GEORGE CROOM ROBERTSON
ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
PHILOSOPHICAL REMAINS
OF
GEORGE GROOM ROBERTSON
GROTE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
WITH. A MEMOIR
EDITED BY
ALEXANDEK BAIN, LL.D.
EMEBITUS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC, UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
AND
T. WHITTAKEE, B.A. (OxoN.)
WILLIAMS AND NOEGATE
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON
AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH
1894
PREFATORY NOTE.
THE present volume contains a collection of the more
important philosophical writings of the late Prof.
Groom Robertson. Outside this work, besides his
volume on Hobbes, there remain his historical
articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Abelard
and Hobbes, his biographies of the Grotes in the
Dictionary of National Biography (George Grote,
his wife and two brothers — John and Arthur) and
other minor contributions to various periodicals.
The memoir is brief and comprehensive rather
than minute. It has been somewhat extended by
insertions of importance, as will be seen in their
places.
The arrangement of the volume, and its super-
intendence through the press, devolved mainly upon
Mr. T. Whittaker. Mr. Whittaker had long been
Robertson's assistant in preparing critical and other
notices for Mind.
The only deviation from full and literal reproduc-
tion of the papers is in the case of the first — which
is an abridgment, by Mr. Whittaker, of Robertson's
inaugural lecture in University College. This lecture
is of special interest, as showing how well he had
mapped out the ground that he eventually occupied
in his philosophical teaching and writing.
The Editors have to acknowledge the courtesy of
Messrs. A. & C. Black, in freely according permission
to reprint the author's philosophical contributions
to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
A. B.
ABERDEEN, April, 1894.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Memoir, jx
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS (1866-1877).
Psychology in Philosophic Teaching 1
Philosophy as a Subject of Study 6
The English Mind 28
The Senses ... • 46
How we come by our Knowledge ... 63
ARTICLES FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (1875).
Analogy ... 75
Analysis ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 82
Analytic Judgments ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 99
Association of Ideas 102
Axiom 119
ARTICLES, NOTES, AND DISCUSSIONS FROM MIND (1876-(1891.
Sense of Doubleness with Crossed Fingers ... ... ... ... 133
Logic and the Elements of Geometry (I.) ... ... ... ... 135
(II.) 140
Jevons's Formal Logic ... 146
Philosophy in London ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 166
The Logic of " If " 184
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century 188
The Physical Basis of Mind 206
Philosophy in Education ... ... ... ... ... ... 230
The Action of so-called Motives ... ... ... ... ... 244
Psychology and Philosophy ... ... ... ... ... ... 250
Leibniz and Hobbes 274
The Psychological Theory of Extension ... ... ... ... 279
Dr. H. Miinsterberg on Apperception ... ... ... 288
Some Newly Discovered Letters of Hobbes ... ... ... ... 303
Miinsterberg on ' Muscular Sense' and ' Time Sense ' 317
Prof. L. Stem on Leibniz and Spinoza 334
VI 11 CONTENTS.
CRITICAL NOTICES FROM MIND (1877-1892).
PAGE
Ferrier's Functions of the Brain ... ... ... ... ... ... 343
Maudsley's Physiology of Mind ... ... ... ... ... ... 353
Pillon and Meinong on Hume 360
Bacon's Novum Organum (ed. Fowler) ... ... ... ... ... 368
Huxley's Hume 373
Courtney's Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill ..: 379
Bastian's The Brain as an Organ of Mind ... ... ... ... 387
Fraser's Berkeley 402
Siebeck's Geschichte. der Psychologic ... ... ... ... ... 406
Seth's Scottish Philosophy 417
Dewey*s Psychology ... 424
Max Muller's Science of Thought... ... ... .. ... ... 430
Hobbes's Elements of Law and Behemoth (ed. Tonnies) ... ... 446
Janet's L'Automatisme Psychr>logique ... .. ... ... ... 452
Pikler's Psycholog y of the Belief in Objective Existence 465
Picavet's Les Ideologues ' 471
MEMOIR.
GEORGE GROOM EOBERTSON was born in Aberdeen on 10th
March, 1842. During the earliest years of infancy, he was con-
stitutionally delicate, and, partly on this account, and partly not
to stimulate a brain that already gave signs of unusual activity,
he did not commence his education till he was six years of age.
He was sent first to a dame's school. He mastered the alphabet
and learned to read in an astonishingly short time. After a few
weeks of this elementary training, he was transferred to the
school maintained by the Incorporated Trades, then under the
charge of Mr. Eoger, — -a teacher of some note in his day and a
fine specimen of the schoolmaster of the olden type ; being as
thorough and exact a teacher as he was a strict disciplinarian.
The subjects he taught were reading, writing, arithmetic,
geography, English composition, and Bible knowledge under
the guidance of the Shorter Catechism.
Having spent four years under this regime, Robertson went
on, at the age of eleven, to the Grammar School, — where, for
the first three years of his course, he was under the tuition of
Mr. John Brebner, now Superintendent of Education in the
Orange Free State, South Africa. During his fourth year, he
was taught by the rector, Mr. Thomas W. Evans. At the
Grammar School, the principal topic was Latin, to which were
added English (chiefly history) and the elements of Greek.
George proved so apt a pupil that, not only did he carry off
prizes (some of them firsts) at the several annual examinations,
but, at the end of the fourth year, while there was still a year
of the usual curriculum to run, he gained by competition the
second bursary at Marischal College and University, — which,
accordingly, he entered as a student in November, 1857. The
first winter was occupied with Greek, under Prof. E. J. Brown,
then an elderly man but a not inefficient teacher ; Latin, under
Eobert Maclure, a man of a fair schoolmaster type, with the
genius of translation. At the end of the session, Eobertson
carried off the second prize in Greek, and stood eighth in Latin.
X MEMOIR.
Second year — Higher Classes in Greek and Latin ; Mathematics,
under Dr. John Cruickshank, a teacher of the first order ; and
Natural History, under James Nicol, the well-known Geologist.
At the end, his prizes were — Greek, first ; Latin, fourth ; Mathe-
matics, eighth ; Natural History, fourth. Third winter — Senior
Mathematics ; Natural Philosophy, under James Clerk Maxwell,
and a voluntary extra class in Greek. At the close, he stood —
Mathematics, seventh ; Natural Philosophy, twelfth ; Greek,
first.
At this point, occurred the great revolution in the Aberdeen
colleges, by which they lost their individuality and were trans-
formed into one institution — the United University of Aberdeen.
As there were • duplicate professors in all the Arts subjects, the
elder of the pair was superannuated and the work carried on
by the younger. The winter session, 1860-61, was the first
under the new system, with this qualification, that students
who had commenced their courses in the separate colleges were
allowed to finish under the regulations previously in force in
each. In Robertson's case, all that remained obligatory was
to attend the Moral Philosophy Class of Prof Martin, the
former Marischal College Professor, now retained in the United
University. The new programme of subjects included, for the
first time in Aberdeen, a separate chair of Logic, attendance on
which was to be compulsory only on students now entering the
United University. Nevertheless, the class was actually formed,
although attendance could not yet be made obligatory. Robert-
son attended it voluntarily ; and this was the first occasion of
my coming into contact with him. He took a high place in the
examinations, and at the same time distinguished himself in the
class of Prof. Martin. He took the M.A. degree with highest
honours, in April, .1861 ; his leading subjects being Classics
and Philosophy.
In October of the same year, there were instituted the Fer-
guson Scholarships, of the value of £100 a year for two years,
open to graduates of all the four Scotch Universities. One of
the two was for Classics and Mental Philosophy combined.
Robertson competed for this and was successful. My more
particular intimacy with him commenced in the months of his
preparation for the competition. The examiner in Philosophy
was Dr. McCosh, then Professor in Belfast. It was a condition
of the scholarship that the successful candidate should for two
years pursue a course of study under the direction of the Trust ;
MEMOIR. XI
and Prof. McCosh was appointed to give the requisite direc-
tions in this instance. Robertson at once availed himself of the
fund at his disposal to pursue his studies on a very wide scale.
The winter of 1861-2 was spent by him in London, where he
attended selected classes in University College ; one being Prof.
Masson's senior class of English Literature, in which he gained
the second prize. He 'also attended Maiden's Senior Greek,
and the Chemistry class of Prof. Williamson.
In July, 1862. he proceeded to Germany. His first resort
was Heidelberg, where he stayed eight weeks ; his principal
occupation being mastering German. It was to Berlin that
he looked for the fullest scope to his curiosity in the wide
domain of philosophical and other learning. He reached the
German capital on the 24th of September, and remained till the
latter end of March — a period of five months, which included the
winter semestre at the University. He attended two classes of
Trendelenburg — one in Psychology, four hours a week ; one on
the Metaphysics of Aristotle, two hours a week ; Du Bois Rey-
mond, Physiology, five hours a week ; Althaus on Hegel, one
hour a week ; Bona Meyer on Kant, two hours a week. He
paid frequent visits to Dorner, and afterwards kept up a friendly
correspondence with him and with Trendelenburg. He also saw
Lepsius at his house, and, on leaving, was presented by him with
a copy of his Royal Dynasties of Egypt. He maintained, at the
same time, a sedulous course of reading, devoting himself more
especially to Kant.
Leaving Berlin, he made a tour in Eastern Germany on his
way to Gottingen, where he remained two months. He attended
Lotze on Metaphysics and Rudolf Wagner on Physiology.
With both these he had subsequent correspondence, and obtained
from Wagner a letter of introduction to Broca in Paris, whither
he now directed his course. He arrived on the 24th of June,
and continued there till the 10th of September — a very busy
time, but details are wanting. He was recalled to Aberdeen
by the intimation of a vacancy in the Examinership in Philosophy,
but that he failed to obtain. He now remained at home, devot-
ing himself to philosophical study. It was during the year
following his arrival that I obtained his assistance in revising
The Senses and the Intellect for a second edition. He elaborated
a number of valuable notes from his German studies, — such as
the addition made to the handling of the muscular sense. Also,
for The Emotions and the Will, he contributed the classifications
Xll MEMOIK.
of the Feelings prevalent in Germany,— those of Kant, Herbart,
and their followers; and in other ways aided in the revision.
After bringing out the second edition of those two volumes, I
was occupied for some time in preparing a Manual of Ehetoric.
For this he compiled the Classification of the SPECIES OF POETRY
and VERSIFICATION. He, likewise, co-operated with me in mak-
ing a search for suggestions and illustrations in Aristotle's
Ehetoric and Quintilian's Institutes. The result, however, was
disappointing ; extremely little could be discovered in either
for adaptation to a modern manual. In September, 1864, he was
appointed teaching assistant to Prof. Geddes, and shared with
him the work of his Greek classes. He performed the same
duty for session 1865-66. The remuneration was £100 a year, and
no duty was required during the seven months' vacation. He
was able, therefore, to devote himself largely to philosophical
work. In 1864, he wrote an article on German Philosophy for
the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, which appeared in
the July number. He also wrote an article on Kant and Sweden-
borg in Macmillan, for May, the same year.
In the summer of 1866, a vacancy occurred in the Chair of
Mental Philosophy and Logic in University College, London.
After an abortive attempt on the Chair of Philosophy in Owen's
College, Manchester, Robertson became a candidate for this
vacancy. His chief rival was Dr. James Martineau, whose
cause was espoused with great energy by one section of the
Council, while another section, under Crete's leadership, favoured
Eobertson. The leading incidents of the struggle are given with
official exactness by himself in his life of Grote in the Dictionary
of National Biography. The election took place in December,
and he opened his class in January, 1867.
His residence henceforth was London.
Before he left Aberdeen, I obtained still further assistance
from him towards the Manual of Ethics, forming part of Mental
and Moral Science. His contributions were — The Neo-Platonists,
The Scholastic Ethics, Hobbes, Cumberland, Cudworth, Kant,
Cousin, and Jouffroy. He had no further hand in the Manual
except in revising some portions of the proofs.
Not long after being appointed to University College, he con-
ceived the project. of a work on Hobbes ; for which Grote gave
him every encouragement, and wrote to the Duke of Devonshire
to procure for him access to the MSS. preserved in the family
seats. As usually happens, this design proved more laborious
MEMOIR. Xlll
and protracted than was at first imagined. In addition to the
labour that might naturally be counted upon, an unexpected
difficulty was encountered in connexion with Hobbes's mathe-
matical writings. It seems that in Molesworth's edition these
were very carelessly edited. In order to do justice to the hot
and lengthened controversy between Hobbes and Wallis, he had,
at considerable pains, to resuscitate his mathematical knowledge
and to trace out the sophistical reasonings of Hobbes through all
the disguises that his ingenuity enabled him to put on.
One portion of his researches on the biographical part ap-
peared in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the completing
section of the biography, together with a survey of the writings,
came out in the volume in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics.
Although this work was not executed on the scale originally
projected, it preserved the most important part of his labours,
and is duly appreciated by students of philosophy. His enlarged
purpose would have included more copious reference to the great
contemporaries and precursors of Hobbes, whom he had studied
with no less care, and to whom he might have done justice
in other forms had he been longer spared.
For his elementary lectures at the College he prepared, with
all due painstaking, courses of Logic, deductive and inductive,
systematic Psychology, and Ethical Theory. All through his
career his attention was nearly equally divided between the
elaboration of philosophical doctrines according to their most
advanced treatment, and the history of philosophy both ancient
and modern. The summer courses at University College, which
were adapted to the requirements of the M.A. degree at the
University of London, generally took him into fresh ground — the
ancients and the moderns alternately — and were the occasion of
a special study of the original authorities. His accumulated
stores of historical material were thus very great, as his publica-
tions from time to time made manifest. A few more years of
active vigour would have enabled him to leave a monument of
the history of philosophy second to none. His doctrinal clearness
was a notable and pervading characteristic of all his expositions
of foregone thinkers.
He delivered some carefully prepared popular lectures at
Manchester, Newcastle, and the Eoyal Institution, London.
One subject was "The Senses"; another "Kant," on whom
he gave a course of four lectures at the Eoyal Institution in 1874.
His introductory lecture at the College for October, 1868, appeared
XIV MEMOIR.
in the Fortnightly Review. Other topics of popular lecturing
were "The English Mind," "The History of Philosophy, as
preparation for Descartes," and " Locke". He gave for several
years the philosophical course to the College of Preceptors.
From 1868 to 1873, and again from 1883 to 1888, he was
Examiner in Philosophy in the University of London. His
examination papers are sufficient proof of his efforts to do justice
both to the subjects and to the fair expectations of candidates.
He also acted as Examiner in the University of Aberdeen from
1869 to 1872, and from 1878 to 1881. He examined for the
Moral Science Tripos, Cambridge, in 1877-78, and for the Victoria
University, Manchester, as one of the original staff.
He was engaged by Dr. Findlater, editor of Chambers's
Encyclopedia, to furnish contributions to that work. When the
Messrs. Black projected their new edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, they invited Findlater to become their editor. He
declined the task, and suggested a choice between Thomas
Spencer Baynes and Eobertson. When Baynes entered on the
work, he engaged Eobertson as a contributor in Philosophy. The
articles actually written by him 'were Abelard, Analogy, Analysis,
Analytic Judgments, Autonomy, Association, Axiom, Hobbes.
Baynes had also bespoken from him the article Psychology ;
which he undertook, intending it to be on historical lines. When
the time came near, he found himself unequal to the effort and
recommended James Ward in his stead, — a fortunate arrange-
ment as it turned out.
On the death of Grote in 1871, he had the principal share in
editing the Posthumous Work on Aristotle, which occupied him
the autumn and winter of that year. From the distinctness of
the MS., this was, in one respect, not a difficult task, although
involving a considerable expenditure of time in revision. What
chiefly made it toilsome and anxious was a want of exactness on
Grote's part, through some defect of vision, in entering the
numerical references to the text. Every one of these had to be
carefully verified from the originals. The result was a master-
piece of correct editing ; and the work as thus brought out will
deserve to be ranked as an editio princeps of Grote's monograph
on the Stagirite.
The death of Grote brought out the fact that he had left to
University College a sum of £6000 as an endowment to the
Philosophy Chair. Mrs. Grote, who was entitled to the life in-
terest, surrendered the amount in 1875, two years before her death.
MEMOIR. XV
In the year of the publication of Aristotle, 1872, Eobertson
married Caroline Anna Crompton, daughter of Justice Crompton.
She was in every sense a helpmeet ; having the same views on
the higher questions of life, and being an earnest labourer in the
public questions that he also had at heart. She was likewise of
service in his official work, when his strength became barely
equal to its routine.
Kobertson was a member of the Metaphysical Society of
London, which flourished for several years and drew together
a remarkable mixed assemblage of philosophers, politicians, and
ecclesiastics. He contributed a paper on the 13th of May, 1873,
on " The Action of so-called Motives ". This paper was reprinted
in Mind, vol. vii. p. 567, and is one of our best handlings of the
Free Will question on the basis of a critical examination of the
verbal improprieties that obscure the issue.
In 1880, when I resigned the Logic Chair in Aberdeen, he was
by general concurrence my destined successor. So much was
this felt by aspirants to the office, that, until he declared his
resolution on the subject, no other candidate entered the lists.
Only after he made up his mind to remain in London was there
an open competition.
In 1874, I broached to him the founding of a Quarterly Journal
of Philosophy ; explaining my notions as to its drift, and asking
his opinion of the project. My desire was that he should be
editor in the fullest sense of the word ; and, on that condition, I
undertook the publishing risks. After full consideration he
approved of the design, and accepted the editorship on the terms
proposed to him. The subsequent steps necessarily were to
obtain the concurrence and approbation of active workers in the
field. I first approached Mr. Herbert Spencer, and found him
cordial in favour of the scheme. I next saw Messrs. Venn and
Sidgwick in Cambridge, and obtained their full concurrence and
promise of support. Other parties were seen by Eobertson, or
corresponded with, both in England and in Scotland. The
amount of encouragement was such as to decide us in organising
the work for speedy publication. We at first thought that it
might be brought out in the course of the following year, 1875;
but as it could not be ready in the beginning of the year, it was
finally arranged that the first number should appear in January,
1876. Eobertson bore the brunt of the requisite preparations
for the start ; settling the plan and arrangement of the numbers,
procuring the requisite pledges of articles in advance, and
XVI MEMOIR.
drafting the programme. It was his happy inspiration that
gave the title, which commended itself at once to every one.
Our earliest success was the series of papers on Philosophy in
the Universities. We had the good fortune to lead off with
Mark Pattison on Oxford, and to secure admirable represen-
tatives for the others in succession ; Eobertson himself supplying
the account of the University of London. Another matter that
we had set our hearts upon we did not succeed in, — viz., to set
going a series of discussions on the conduct of Examinations in
Philosophy. Perhaps, either of ourselves ought to have broken
ground ; but, as we did not do so, many other contributors
naturally have felt shy at an operation involving criticism of one
another's published examination papers. Nevertheless, the
subject is one pre-eminently suited for a free interchange of views.
The enormous number of questions set every year in the depart-
ment of philosophy, in connexion with the conferring of degrees
and otherwise, by exhausting leading questions tempts examiners
to select out-of-the-way and recondite points which do no justice
to the candidate's natural course of study ; an evil that ample
discussion might be able to remedy.
It was of course a prime object of the Journal to keep the
English reader an courant with foreign publications in the
philosophical field — both set treatises and periodicals. In this
last region, most important aid was given at the outset by Prof.
Flint, of St. Andrews, — which he was obliged to discontinue on
being appointed to the Theology Chair in Edinburgh.
The editor spared no pains to procure contributions of a like
nature, and took upon himself a large part of the burden of
supplying the desideratum. Indeed, in every department of
the work of the Journal, it is unnecessary to say that he had
always the lion's share. Now that he is gone, it is a satisfaction
to think that, besides contributing largely to the review of
novelties from every corner, and expounding the great historical
names of the past, he communicated his most advanced re-
flexions upon many leading questions in psychology, philosophy,
and logic. It is perhaps unnecessary for me to say more, con-
sidering that the result is accessible, and that the collective
body of contributors have recently given expression to their
estimate of his merits. It would, however, be an omission on
my part, not to express the deliberate opinion formed on sixteen
years' experience, that I regarded him as, in every point of view,
a model editor.
MEMOIR. XV11
Twelve years before his death, his fatal malady began to show
itself. On discovering the serious nature of the attack — calculus
in the kidney, — he set himself to work to parry its advances by
every form of precaution and self-denial that his skilled advisers
and his own experience could suggest ; being aided by the un-
remitting devotion of his wife. How such a malady could have
got possession of him at the age of thirty-eight, it is needless to
speculate. This much we can pronounce, after the event, that
the strain of his intellectual application from early years was
excessive. His persistent labours were aggravated by a fervour
of manner which, though raising his value as a public teacher,
involved a nervous expenditure that even a naturally healthy
system could not well afford.
During sessions 1883-4, 1886-7, and part of 1887-8, he had to
employ substitutes for his teaching work. He had given in his
resignation in April, 1888; but the Council declined to accept it,
until he should have the relief of another session by means of
substitute. He finally resigned on the 7th May, 1892.
He threw himself with the utmost zeal into the business
management of the College, first as a member of Senate, and
latterly as one of the Senate's representatives on the Council . Not
long after his appointment, Grote learned with great satisfaction
that he was highly esteemed among his colleagues in the Senate
for his judgment and energy in business matters. In the larger
sphere of the Council's operations, he promised to make himself
extremely serviceable, when his failure in health obliged him to
withdraw from being a member.
His colleague, Prof. Carey Foster, has furnished an estimate
of his character and active co-operation in the business of the
College, first in the Senate, and latterly in the Council. I give
it in his own words : —
" For some time after his appointment as Professor, he was
not a frequent attendant at meetings, being presumably occupied
with the work of his Chair, and leaving general questions to the
management of his older colleagues.
" His great value was very much in the part he took in dis-
cussion. Here he was always ready, clear, and to the point. Of
course, in connexion with the business of such an institution as
University College, it will often happen that proposals are made
which, for some reason or other, are distinctly undesirable, but
which it is not easy to meet in an effective way on the spur of
Will MEMOIR.
the moment, at least not without taking an attitude of personal
opposition to the proposer. In such cases, I have often been
very much struck with Robertson's quickness in seizing the
proper ground of principle to be adopted in considering the
course proposed. Generally, almost always, I am happy to say,
he and I were closely agreed in our views ; but, while I might
be casting about to find the right way of meeting a proposal I
disapproved of, the opportunity for useful opposition would
often be gone. Eobertson, on the other hand, would cut in at
once with exactly the right consideration of general policy to
which all were ready to agree.
"He was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Laws for the
Session 1871-2, and of the Faculty of Science for the Session
1880-1, and 1881-2. This is an office which involves a very
considerable amount of attention to current working details, and
Eobertson discharged it on both occasions with great efficiency and
assiduity, but I do not find any special records of importance.
" In 1883 a matter occurred which, at the time, created a good
deal of feeling, both in the College and in some circles outside.
This was the refusal of the Council to admit Mrs. Annie Besant
and Miss Alice Bradlaugh to the Class of Practical Botany.
I think there is no doubt that the Council acted within their
legal power in this case, but many of us, Eobertson very decidedly,
disapproved of their action, and felt that it was not only inex-
pedient but opposed to the spirit of our traditions.
" In 1886, for the first time, Professors were admitted (first at
three, afterwards, in 1888, six) to serve on the Council of the
College. Eobertson was selected by his colleagues on the Senate
as one of their first three representatives. He held office for
four years, and, while health lasted, was very assiduous in his
attention to the business of the Council. In particular, he took
an active part in the discussions that arose on the drafting
of the Charter of the proposed Albert (afterwards Gresham)
University. He was a member of the Special Committee charged
with the matter, and strove energetically to give to the scheme
at once a more liberal and more academic character than it
eventually assumed. If his health had allowed him to make
still greater exertions, perhaps this scheme would have had a
different issue."
By help of extracts from the minutes of the Senate where
Eobertson's name appears, some further particulars may be
MEMOIR. XIX
gleaned as to his lines of activity. In particular, with reference
to the admission of women into the classes in which University
College took the lead, he bore a prominent part. In the various
steps by which the final result of mixed classes in every depart-
ment was arrived at, he was a chief spokesman and adviser. It
was on 23rd April, 1869, that he moved appointment of a com-
mittee "to consider the expediency of admission of women to
classes in University College ". A report presented 4th May
recommended that classes for ladies in physics and chemistry,
in connexion with the Ladies' Educational Association, be held
in the College next session. This meant that the Professors
should repeat their courses to women exclusively ; a necessarily
burdensome imposition upon the teaching strength of the College.
The Professor of Political Economy, Cairnes, having represented
himself as unequal to a duplicate course, was allowed to teach a
class of men and women mixed. The mixing gradually extended
to other classes ; the years 1877 and 1878 saw the final admission
of women into the classes generally, Eobertson being on the Com-
mittees that promoted the achievement. In his own class, female
students were latterly in the majority.
He repeatedly sat on Committees of Senate for recommending
appointments to vacant chairs ; as, for example, Mathematics
(De Morgan resigned, Hirst appointed), Applied Mathematics and
Mechanics (Clifford appointed), Political Economy (Cairnes
resigned, Courtney appointed), Greek (Maiden resigned, Wayte
appointed).
Acting under the lead of John Stuart Mill, he entered zealously
into the movement in behalf of women, and was from December,
1870, to December, 1876, a member of the Committee of the
London National Society for Women's Suffrage. A brief account
of the movement will serve to show Eobertson's connexion with
it, more particularly as the recipient of letters from Mill.
In the spring of 1871, serious differences of opinion among the
workers for the movement becoming evident, proposals were made
for the formation in London of a new Committee- — which, when
fully organised, assumed the title of ' Central Committee of the
National Society for Women's Suffrage,' and desired to affiliate
to itself all existing Societies for Women's Suffrage. From the
first, the chief ground of antagonism between the two Committees
(the London National and the Central) was diversity of opinion
XX MEMOIE.
concerning the agitation against the C.D. Acts. Those engaged
in the agitation at no time proposed to use, for their purpose,
funds subscribed for the promotion of Women's Suffrage ; but
many of them did seek and claim perfect freedom to assert, at
Women's Suffrage meetings, that the repeal of the C.D. Acts was
one of the objects for which the suffrage was desired. And they
saw no reason why the same persons should not be prominent in
both agitations.
Although Mill, in common with Eobertson, disapproved of the
C.D. Acts, and, on one occasion, denounced them at a Women's
Suffrage meeting, he became fully convinced that the association
of the two questions would have a most injurious effect on the
prospects of the Women's Suffrage movement. With his cordial
approval, the Committee of the London National Society declined
to connect itself with the new Central Committee, and Mill shortly
afterwards gave his name as Hon. President.
Eobertson took a prominent part in the discussions which led
to this result, was in constant correspondence with Mill on the
subject, and, until Mill's death in May, 1873, continued to be the
medium of communication between the Committee and its Pre-
sident. After Mill's death, he was less actively engaged in the
work of the Committee, though he still frequently attended its
meetings.
When, in the winter of 1876, Mr. Forsyth, who had been the
parliamentary leader of the movement, since the general election
in February, 1874, was succeeded by Mr. Jacob Bright, Eobertson,
along with several of his associates, retired from the Committee.
Thenceforward, while his opinions, I understand, remained un-
changed, he took no part in the Women's Suffrage movement.
A notice of Eobertson that appeared in the Spectator, 1st
October, 1892, by his most intimate friend Mr. Leslie Stephen,
is the best conclusion to the sketch of his life, and saves me from
much that would be necessary to do justice to him. In point of
exactness of appreciation and felicity of statement, it would be
vain in any one to rival the delineation thus afforded.
" I hope that you will permit me to say a few words
about the late Professor Groom Eobertson. I had the great
happiness of an intimate acquaintance with him during the
later years of his life, and can mention some facts which
ought, I think, to be known to all who may have been
MEMOIE. XXI
interested in his work. Every serious student of philosophy
is aware that Prof. Robertson was an accomplished meta-
physician and psychologist. I do not suppose that there are
more than two or three living Englishmen whose knowledge
of those subjects is comparable to his for range and accuracy.
He had given up his whole life and energy to such studies from
very early years, and whatever he did, he did thoroughly. My
own knowledge only enabled me to appreciate his acquirements
within a comparatively small circle ; but whenever I applied to
him for advice and information, I was surprised afresh by the
fulness of his knowledge. He had always considered for him-
self any question that I proposed to him, and knew what was
to be found about it in previous literature. My own experience
was confirmed by those who were better judges than I could
be. It was impossible to consult him without being struck
by his command both of the history of past speculation and
of the latest utterances of modern thinkers. His judgments,
whether one accepted them or not, were at least those of a
powerful, candid, patient, and richly stored intellect. He has
not, indeed, left much behind him to justify an estimate which
will, I think, be accepted by all who knew him. His excellent
monograph upon Hobbes, and a few articles, chiefly critical, in
Mind, are, I fear, all that remains to give any hints of his capac-
ity. For this want of productiveness there were, unfortunately,
amply sufficient reasons. Robertson was, in the first place,
conscientious almost to excess as a worker. He could not bear
to leave undone anything which was necessary to secure the
utmost possible precision. He would not write till he had
considered the matter in hand from every possible point of view,
and read everything at all relevant to his purpose. As editor
of Mind he expended an amount of thought and labour upon the
revision of articles which surprised any one accustomed to more
rough-and-ready methods of editing. Besides correcting mis-
prints or inaccuracies of language, he would consider the
writer's argument carefully, point out weak places, and discuss
desirable emendations as patiently as the most industrious
tutor correcting the exercises of a promising pupil. Contributors
were sometimes surprised to find that their work was thought
deserving of such elaborate examination ; and it often seemed to
me that he could have written a new article with less trouble
than it took him to put into satisfactory shape one already
XX11 MEMOIR.
written, with which, after all, he perhaps did not agree. He
never reviewed a book without thoroughly making himself master
of its contents. He applied, as I have reason to believe, the
same amount of conscientious labour to the discharge of his
duties as Professor. His work in the two capacities absorbed,
therefore, a great proportion of his disposable energy. So con-
scientious a worker was naturally slow in original production.
He would not slur over any difficulty in haste to reach a
conclusion. Robertson, indeed, like most of us, had some very
definite opinions upon disputed questions, and belonged decidedly
to what is roughly called the empirical school. But, whatever
his views, he was always anxious to know and to consider
fairly anything that could be said against them. Had he ever
been able to give a full exposition of his philosophical doctrines,
the last accusation that could ever have been brought against
him would have been that of hasty dogmatism. He might have
failed to appreciate the opposite view ; but the failure would not
have been due to any want of desire to understand it thoroughly.
He was always anxious that Mind should contain a full expression
of all shades of opinion. Whether he succeeded in this is another
question. An editor can open his doors, but he cannot compel
every one to enter. I can only say, from my own knowledge,
that he did his best to secure the co-operation of the men from
whose views he most decidedly dissented.
" There was, however, a cause for want of productiveness
more melancholy and more sufficient than those of which I
have spoken. When I first knew Robertson, he told me that he
was preparing a book upon Hobbes. It would have included
an estimate of the whole philosophical movement of the seven-
teenth century. He had gone into all the preparatory studies
with his usual thoroughness. He had examined the papers
preserved at Chatsworth ; and had at his fingers' ends all the
details of the curious and obscure controversies in which Hobbes
was engaged with the mathematicians as well as with the
philosophers of his time. When I wrote for the Dictionary of
National Biography a life of Hobbes, which was in substance
merely a condensation of Robertson's monograph, supervised by
Robertson himself, I was astonished by his close acquaintance
with all the minutiae of the literary and personal history of the
old philosopher. Unfortunately that monograph was itself only
the condensation of knowledge acquired with a view to his
MEMOIR. XX111
larger work. He was obliged to abandon the original scheme
by the first appearance of a cruel disease from which he was
ever afterwards a sufferer. He had to submit to painful opera-
tions, which severely tried his strength. Though temporary
relief might be obtained, he lived under the constant fear of
renewed attacks, and was forced to observe the strictest regula-
tions for the sake of his health. It was not surprising that his
labours took up all his strength ; but, on the contrary, surprising
that he had strength enough to do what he did. Seldom free
from actual pain, or, at least, discomfort, and never free from
harrowing anxiety as to future suffering, he struggled on, doing
his duty with the old conscientious thoroughness. He was
forced more than once to seek the help of colleagues and friends,
always, I need not say, cheerfully given ; but he did all that
man could do with a really heroic patience. I have sat with
him when he was still in bed from the effects of a painful opera-
tion, and in his periods of comparative ease. He was always
the same, — cheerful, often even in high spirits ; delighting in talk
of all kinds ; keenly interested in all political and social questions,
as well as in his more special studies, and yet by no means
averse to mere harmless gossip ; while always manifesting a
most affectionate zeal on behalf of his personal friends, and of
his own and his wife's relations. A man so tormented might have
been pardoned for occasional irritability. I will not say that
Eobertson never showed such a weakness, but I can say conscien-
tiously that I have never known a man in perfect health and com-
fort who showed it less. On the very rare occasions in which a
little friction occurred between him and some of his acquaint-
ances, I was especially struck by his extreme anxiety to say and
do nothing which was not absolutely necessary in self-defence,
and to guard against being hurried into unfairness by any loss
of temper or personal sensibility. I shall never know a juster or
fairer-minded man. I always looked forward with pleasure to an
interview with him, sure to return on better terms with men and
things, with quickened interest in important questions, and with
the refreshing sense that I had been in contact with a man of
vigorous understanding, and utterly incapable of any mean or
unworthy prejudice.
" During Robertson's severe trials, his wife's society had been
an inestimable support. Of her, I will only say that she was a
worthy companion in a heroic life, that she soothed his sorrows,
XXIV MEMOIR.
shared all his interests, and did all that could be done to secure
his happiness. Eecent losses in her family and his own had
inflicted wounds, taken with the usual courage. In the early
part of this year, a heavier blow was to come. Mrs. Eobertson
was pronounced to be suffering from a fatal disease, of which
there had, indeed, for some time previously been ominous
symptoms. She died on 29th May last, patient and courageous
to the end, having in her last illness made every possible arrange-
ment for her husband's future life. Eobertson bore the heaviest
sorrow that can befall a man in a spirit of quiet heroism, of
which, to speak fittingly, one should use the language rather of
reverence than of admiration. He had resigned his editorship
and his professorship, steps which his wife had seen to be
necessary. He did not, however, abandon his intellectual aspira-
tions. He spent the summer with his relations, and had
sufficient power of reaction to be planning employment for his
remaining life. I heard from him not long ago that he intended,
upon returning to London, to get to work upon Leibnitz, in
whose philosophy he had long taken a special interest. But his
constitution was more shattered than he knew. Thei'e was to
be no more work for him. A slight chill brought on an illness
which was too much for his remnant of strength. He died
peacefully and painlessly on 20th September, within four months
of his wife.
" Eobertson's friends know what he has been to them. They
cannot hope fully to communicate the knowledge to others.
But it seems to me hardly fitting that such a man should be
taken from us without some attempt to put on record their
sense of the noble qualities which are lost to the world. What-
ever the limits imposed upon him by the circumstances I have
mentioned, few men, if any, have done so much in their genera-
tion to promote a serious study of Philosophy in England. But
those who knew him feel more strongly now the loss of a dear
friend. No more true-hearted, affectionate, and modest nature
has ever revealed itself to me ; and if anything could raise my
estimate of the quiet heroism with which he met overpowering
troubles, it would be his apparently utter unconsciousness that
he was displaying any unusual qualities in his protracted struggle
against the most trying afflictions."
PSYCHOLOGY IN PHILOSOPHIC TEACHING.1
THE special question I have chosen for discussion is : What
is the meaning to be attached to the phrase, Philosophy of
Mind? In the wider sense of the phrase, all philosophy
may be called philosophy of mind ; but unless we can some-
how limit its meaning, unless there is some part of the
whole that is at once central and fundamental, and at the
same time suitable for teaching, we are in a bad case. The
English teacher of philosophy has not, like the German, a
subject divided into well-defined departments, all under-
stood to be subordinate to philosophy in general. He
cannot range from one to the other without misleading
students as to their relation to the whole, but must be
severely practical in his choice of subjects. Let us see then
if we cannot find some distinct department of inquiry, on
the face of it answering to the name of Philosophy of the
Mind, and yet so evidently at once fundamental and teach-
able, that it has claims on our attention beyond any other
department apparently fundamental but not teachable, or
really teachable without being fundamental.
The importance of Ethics is allowed ; teachable it is
beyond question ; but in the Philosophy of the Mind it is
not fundamental. ^Esthetics is a subject which, though it
has been less elaborated than Ethics, stands on the same
1 Abstract of Introductory Lecture on appointment as Professor of
Philosophy of Mind and Logic in University College, London (1866).
This Lecture — which is of considerable length— is given in abstract as
containing a very clear statement, dating from so early a period, of the
position with regard to the peculiar importance of Psychology that Prof.
Robertson always consistently maintained.
1
2 PSYCHOLOGY IN PHILOSOPHIC TEACHING.
level ; standing only on the same level, it does not fulfil our
conditions. Logic, if we were to accept the opinion of some
who make it co-ordinate with Ethics and ^Esthetics — the
three sciences answering in like manner to the three great
departments of Mind, viz., Intellect, Will and' Feeling — is
as little fundamental as they. These sciences are all teach-
able ; but they are not what we are in search of. They
are essentially special developments and applications of
something else that is fundamental.
Is Metaphysic this something '? Of Metaphysic, there is
no definition more serviceable than Aristotle's. Under the
name of First Philosophy, Aristotle defines it as the science
of the general principles common to all forms of Existence,
or, which is the same thing, to the subject-matter of the
different special sciences. If such a science existed in an
indubitable shape, it could indeed claim to be in a certain
sense fundamental and of altogether pre-eminent import-
ance. But does a definite Science of Metaphysic exist ?
It is true that nearly every great philosopher since Aristotle
has had his Metaphysic — observe the expression ; but not
one has succeeded in establishing fixed principles univer-
sally allowed. Though they have not passed away leaving
no trace and accomplishing nothing, yet all the meta-
physical systems, as such, have alike come to an end. This
is illustrated especially by the history of the ambitious post-
Kantian systems in Germany.
It is clear that if Metaphysic is ever really to exist in a
settled form, it will not come by the way of merely specula-
tive construction, as a simple evolution of thought, but in a
far less direct and far more laborious way. Without pre-
judging the future, then, we may find better employment
than trying to persuade ourselves that Metaphysic exists
already. Not that the establishment of anything that can
be called a Metaphysic must wait upon the completion of
the special sciences. At every stage, we must order our
knowledge somehow — must encircle it with metaphysical
conceptions of some sort. But is a time of widening and
deepening special knowledge, both of the world without
and of that which concerns us more, the world within, the
best time for making metaphysical considerations prominent?
PSYCHOLOGY IN PHILOSOPHIC TEACHING. 3
Ought we not now to impress above all the necessity of ex-
tending knowledge, and refuse to sacrifice everything to a
subject neither easily communicable to beginners nor afford-
ing a true starting-point for discovery?
The real and natural beginning is a rigorous investigation
of the phenomena of mind. If all Philosophy must be
essentially Philosophy of the Mind, because it views nothing
except in express relation to Thought, the question as to
the innermost nature of mental action must surely be taken
first. It is Psychology that attempts to answer this question ;
and Psychology, which is equivalent to Philosophy of the
Mind in a narrow sense, will thus be the most fundamental
and representative part of Philosophy, or Philosophy of the
Mind, taken at the widest. That this is not a statement made
for mere convenience will appear if we turn to history. We
shall then find that almost every important philosophical
revival after a time of speculative quiescence, and every im-
portant philosophical reformation after a time of too highly
strained metaphysical dogmatism or unsatisfying scepticism,
has been begun by some man who saw the necessity of
looking deeper into the mental constitution. The point of
view of all modern philosophy from Descartes onward is
psychological. It is not English philosophy that has re-
mained least true to this conception. And we may find in
Germany ardent converts to the cause of scientific psycho-
logy as the true point of departure in philosophy. If, as
seems now at last likely, the German current of philoso-
phical inquiry and the English are about to meet and flow
on henceforth in a single channel, it is hardly to the disad-
vantage of the English that it has not been spreading itself
in futile wanderings, and in vain efforts to water boundless
wastes.
Psychology then is, and must still be for a long time to i
come, the only true point of departure in philosophy for us
and for all ; and if it has not been expressly pointed out
that it satisfies our other requirement of being eminently
teachable, this is because that seemed a work of supereroga-
tion.
How is Philosophy of the Mind, in its limited sense of
Psychology, to be treated? The extremest form which
4 PSYCHOLOGY IN PHILOSOPHIC TEACHING.
difference of treatment can assume seems to be found be-
tween those who trust to individual introspection only, and
take its immediate data as they find them, and those who
confine themselves to no single line of observation, but,
proclaiming the necessity of analysing back to the begin-
nings and elementary conditions of conscious life, think every
way good that helps at all to take them there. The Faculty-
hypothesis is the proper expression of the first position. It
would be unjust, indeed, not to point out that mental
introspection, without other aids, has sufficed to lead some,
who knew how to use it, to far deeper views*; but, if still
further insight is to be gained, we must go not only beyond
the traditional doctrine, but beyond the traditional method.
If mental science requires only simple observation of the
internal kind, what was to hinder observers like Aristotle —
a better simple observer modern times do not show — from
bringing Psychology to completion ?
That physiology in particular, among the objective aids
to introspection, gives real psychological insight, may be
shown by definite cases. For example, we see the vertical
line of a cross longer than the horizontal line when the two
lines are really of equal length. The illusion is explicable by
the greater exertion required to move the muscles of vertical
, than of horizontal motion ; and this explanation is not
' attainable by mere introspection. A more difficult case,
where physiology has also proved applicable, is the question
of unconscious mental modifications. Again, the distinction
between active and passive sensation has already revolu-
tionised the question of perception. This distinction was
not particularly noted until the time when the modern
science of physiology was being founded ; and even if
we grant (what is probably not true) that the antithesis
could ever have been fully apprehended by the subjective
consciousness alone, we are much aided in conceiving it by
physiology.
To take account of the objective states that run parallel
with subjective states is not speculative materialism. Nor
does all the difference between the common and the ad-
vanced psychology consist in talking about nerves and
muscles. If there were time, it could be shown that im-
PSYCHOLOGY IN PHILOSOPHIC TEACHING. 5
portant aid is to be got from many other sources ; from
comparative psychology, statistics, history, &c. Even then
the true difference would not have been given, for it is a
difference of general spirit, which shows itself not so much
in resorting to any particular species of inquiry, as in
a readiness to resort to every kind that can be turned to
account.
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.1
TT having fallen to me on this occasion to offer the few
words of general welcome at the beginning of our academic
session, I have chosen to speak upon a subject — the Study
of Philosophy — which may seem to require some apology.
As our plan of education is constituted, and not only here in
London, there is no subject included in the round of general
liberal study that lies more in the outer confines or is taken
up later than philosophy. Very few of you can as yet have
begun the study ; of the more advanced there may even be
a number who, in pursuance of some more special aims,
have determined never to begin ; and those who now appear
here for the first time can hardly be expected to feel much
concern in a branch of study which they will approach only
some years later, if ever they come near it at all. Why,
then, for such an audience, select such a subject of discourse?
For several reasons. In the first place, the subject being
the one in which the speaker is specially interested, he may,
to that extent, be likely to speak to greater purpose. If this
in general might not be a very safe reason to advance, it
may pass here along with a second— that philosophy,
however we may put away the teaching of it, is a curious
subject, as appealing somehow to all thinking beings, and
claiming to say its word about all things ; while, as com-
manding interest, it happens to have a curious history, both
for itself, and in the particular relation, as a subject of study,
in which we are now to consider it. In the third place, if
in this particular relation there should turn out occasion for
saying something against prevailing views or practice, and
1 The Introductory Lecture at University College, London, October,
1868. — Keprinted, by permission, from the Fortnightly Keview, Decem-
ber, 1868.
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 7
in favour of different views and a different practice, one
could not desire fitter audience than just such an assemblage
of young men, all embarked on a course of academic study ;
which means that you are open-minded votaries of science,
and none of you either too old and stiffened in your ideas,
or too young and unconcerned, to be impressed, and perhaps
converted, by suggestions put forth in the interest of pure
knowledge. These are some reasons, and it would be easy
to add others. But I think I may assume that you are all
willing enough, in the meantime and until we see, to sink the
objection that philosophy lies far away about the end of our
college prospectus, out of the path of commoner interest.
The fault will then be mine, if at the close the objection is
left as one that can still ba urged.
It would seem most natural to begin by explaining ex-
actly the meaning of philosophy : but I make nothing of
leaving that to come out in the course of the remarks. It
is not only the foes of philosophy that will be found talking
about the difficulty of its definition. Its advocates may
very well know that they are fighting for something, and
what they are fighting for, although they cannot make
themselves comprehended so easily by all, or so precisely by
any, as the botanist or the mineralogist. As already hinted,
there is simply nothing real or thinkable, and no possible
relation among things, that does not somehow come within
the philosopher's province ; and this is what no special
inquirer can say of his science. We cannot wonder, then,
at peculiar difficulties of expression. When it comes to be
a question of making charges or suggestions, I am bound to
be explicit. Meanwhile, it may be enough to call philosophy
the reasoned search for ultimate and most general compre-
hension of the universe of things, with conscious regard to
the fact of their being thought.
Now if history attests anything, it proclaims a search of
this kind to be one of the most irrepressible impulses of
human nature, as soon as the race anywhere attains a
moderate degree of security of existence. It is not, how-
ever, this general truth that I want to begin by impressing,
but a more special fact, — that philosophy has from of old
entered very largely into the educational scheme of the chief
8 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
historical peoples, and in this shape has been a great factor
in human history.
Of necessity we look first to Greece, because it is to the
Greek settlers on the coa"st of Asia Minor, who, about 600
years before Christ, began to reason out some general
expression for the multiplicity of human experience, that
we trace back the whole movement of thought, at least in
the Western world. Once begun, how eagerly the move-
ment was sustained by different sections of the Hellenic
race is a remarkable story, even before we can clearly note
at Athens, less than two centuries later, its first large edu-
cational result. About the Sophists we all have heard, and
about Socrates, whom some call the greatest of them, and
others the founder of a truer teaching upon the overthrow of
theirs. For our present purpose it is enough that in the fore-
most human culture of that time questions of philosophy —
reasonings about the general frame of things and all the
highest concerns of humanity — made so great a part, that the
youth of the small city then at the head of the race could
support a large band of philosophical instructors, and helped
to excite to a life of strange questioning and critical activity
one man with whom the human mind awoke to a new
apprehension of the meaning of science or true knowledge.
And this was but the first result. For, from that time, as
the history of Greek literature was mainly the history of
Greek philosophy, of efforts unceasingly carried on, amid
political revolutions and national decay, to compass the
nature and reason of things, to discover the rational rule of
life, and unlock the secret of human destiny, so all highest
instruction was had in philosophic schools. Nor must we
think thus only of Greeks. The ancient pagan world,
enduring some four or five centuries into the Christian era,
never knew the national rivalry in science and philosophy
so familiar to us ; and though Boman dominion might cover
all, and Latins contest the palm with Greeks in poetry,
oratory, and history, the philosophical thought about man
and the universe was always in substance Hellenic. To the
last the ancients had but two great centres of science and
learning, or, as we should say, universities ; and they were
the Hellenic cities of Athens and Alexandria. When we
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 9
see, then, at Athens, the chair of Plato filled by an unbroken
line of teachers for some 800 years, and observe the struggle
between Paganism and Christianity protracted at Alex-
andria by the desperate efforts of Neo-Platonist professors
to retain hold of the minds of youth, with a doctrine com-
bining the mysticism of Plato and the width and demon-
strative force of Aristotle, we could not have more striking
evidence of the place and power of philosophy in the ancient
instruction.
Upon the triumph of the Church, coinciding with the
great inroads of the barbarians, the centuries of darkness
and confusion followed, and when the light of philosophy
and science went up in the world again, it was first in the
Arab dominion stretching from Bagdad to Cordova. But
in Christendom, also, no sooner were monastic schools
planted during Charlemagne's brief triumph over European
disorder, than philosophy resumed her ancient place at the
head of instruction. Alcuin was sent for from these islands,
where the darkness had never been so complete, to direct
the -new intellectual movement ; and in the next century,
the ninth, another philosopher, John Scotus Erigena, Irish
or Scotch by birth, struck at Paris the first note of that
famous system of Scholasticism which, after another
century or more of blank confusion, engaged all the
intellect of Europe until the fifteenth, and struggled for
mastery over the human mind far into the modern period.
By nature the very opposite of an unfettered and disinter-
ested intellectual search for truth, scholasticism, or Church-
philosophy, did yet include an element of independent
thinking for which it has seldom got credit ; and incorporat-
ing itself in a remarkable organisation of instruction and
free interchange of thought, it was for a long time in a very
real sense a philosophical liberal education. And, for one
thing, it is by no means clear that in so greatly extending
the scholastic horizon of thought and knowledge, we have
been as careful as the schoolmen were about the discipline
that gives the power of sweeping it.
The sixteenth century ushered in a new era. It was
not, as some say, that positive science then of a sudden
sprang into life ; for, although the chief scientific discoveries
10 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
began to date from about that time, the mistake is as great
to suppose that men did not scientifically observe, experi-
ment, and reason before, as that they never have used
wrong methods or landed in unscientific conclusions since.
Nor was it because, qwing to a hundred social and political
causes, the revival of letters took place, enriching Europe
with the treasures of ancient literature, and overpowering
the scholastic mind with a first true notion of what the
Greeks had achieved in philosophy. It was rather that
men had outgrown — very slowly, but still outgrown — the
scholastic conceptions, and could no longer be held by so
narrow an idea of the universal order, nor satisfied with
such a notion of the human lot. So, except for the natural
revulsion in a number of miuds against everything — even
to the name of philosophy — associable with the cast-off
system, it was an ardent desire for a new settlement of
all highest questions rather than any disposition to ignore
them, that characterised the transition to our modern
.period. The men who at last, after a time of fermentation,
opened the paths of modern activity — Bacon, Descartes,,
and even Galileo — had all the large grasp, and each in
his own way conceived the scientific task with the compre-
hensiveness and peculiar insight that mark the philosopher.
So far as their influence prevailed in the seventeenth
century — Descartes' in particular — against Scholasticism,
which died hard in its own universities, there was no
decline in the philosophic character of liberal instruc-
tion.
I might carry this review further, but I am content to
have merely brought before your minds the connexion of
the study of philosophy with the great stages of human
history, if thus there may appear some reason for looking
more closely to see what place it holds in the education of
the present day, when public instruction has become the
foremost social question for all.
First, for other countries, we may glance at France and
Germany. In France, a course of philosophy, meaning
logic and psychology, enters, nominally at least, into the
secondary, or general liberal education of the lycees or public
schools, and there is provision for prosecuting the subject
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 11
specially, in the superior, or faculty instruction. In
Germany, the study of late, practically, has vanished from
the general or gymnasial course, except as it has been
prominently brought forward again in the new liberal
system of Austria ; at the universities it retains the place
it never ceased to hold, and now for a century has held in
such a way as more than anything else to have procured
for them their unique reputation, and for the country its
place at the head of European thought. Thus a faint
recognition of philosophy as a subject for all, more
especially in France, and a striking acknowledgment of
the importance of its special cultivation by a smaller
number, especially in Germany, — this is what we observe
in the chief Continental countries where the educational
system has been recast for modern wants, on the definite
principle of separating general and special training, and
completely organising both.
In our own country there has been no general movement
of reorganisation, nor, to aid us in appreciating the exact
position of the subject, is there a uniformity of system.
Still, amid the great difference of educational resources,
appetite and results, from one part of the island to another,
our teaching universities happened to agree in being first
of all places of general education, and not seats of high
special instruction like the chief universities abroad ; special
study with us, except in three professional departments,
which, in a more or less perfunctory way, are provided with
instruction, being left to private work, under a spur of
honours examinations, or some other kind of reward. Now,
evidently, one consequence of this for the study of philo-
sophy must be that it is nowhere, unless accidentally,
carried very far. But there will also be this other conse-
quence, that where the subject is seriously taught at all,
it will affect a large number, and, as a university-subject,
probably affect them more deeply than if it were taught at
school.
Both results are precisely what we find appearing in the
Scotch universities — institutions that have long performed
with credit the task of imbuing a very large proportion of
the youth of the country with a liberal instruction, that has
12 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
been found an admirable preparation for practical life, and
a very good general basis for the few who have gone else-
where to make special studies. Every one of the many
Scotchmen completing a liberal education at home attends
a long and serious course of lectures on logic, and another
on ethical or metaphysical philosophy. I do not know
another system of general education that either enjoins so
much of high discipline, or manages to make it so effective.
Germany, if she gets far more out of some at the univer-
sities— and let Scotland look to that — certainly gets nothing
like it out of the many, either at university or gymnasium.
And the system, on its strong side, has effects which may
be traced not obscurely in British literature and science
for the last 150 years.
The old English universities cannot be said, like the
Scotch, to save their reputation by spreading wide the
philosophical instruction which they do not carry far. At
Oxford, the rival of Paris in the great days of scholasticism,
and Cambridge, the seat of a school of thought as late as
the seventeenth century, the study of philosophy, from a
multitude of causes, sank to the lowest point in the eigh-
teenth, from which it is still only in process of revival. A.S
things stand, in discharge of their function of places of
general education, both admit philosophical study, but it is
not exacted as in Scotland. Higher study they encourage,
the one by giving it a prominent place in the honours and
fellowship examinations, the other by a special examination
indeed, but one which hitherto has conferred barren honours
in a region where academic honours are anything but barren.
It would be wrong, nevertheless, not to acknowledge the
ardour with which some have worked for the restoration of
philosophy to a more worthy place in Oxford and Cam-
bridge ; and for this, as for other things, the future is full
of hope.
I come now to ourselves in London, with our instruction
and examination of purely modern origin, and constituted
independently of each other. The examination-system of
the University is particularly worthy of notice, being the
most varied and comprehensive that exists, and specially
calculated for present wants. The recognition of philosophy
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 13
is very remarkable. For the B.A., or common degree in
the liberal arts, as much knowledge is demanded as at the
Scotch universities, and the higher degree of M.A. can be
taken in philosophy, along with political economy, as a
special subject. From a system of examination nothing
more could be sought, either in the way of making the
study general amongst men of liberal training, or of en-
couraging a few to go deeper. But the action of the univer-
sity does not stop here. It grants also degrees in science,
upon the guarantee of the matriculation test for general
knowledge ; and here, while requiring for the lower degree
as much philosophy as for the B.A., offers the higher
scientific distinction for special proficiency in the subject
under the name' of mental science. Again, nothing more
could be desired, either for imbuing scientific men generally
(for reasons we may have occasion to see) with a philosophic
spirit, or for stirring up carefully trained scientific minds to
the deeper investigation of philosophical questions, which
too often, it cannot be denied, have been made the sport of
poetic fancy or been taken in hand by those who were
interested in a certain solution of them. Nor does even
this complete the account of the recognition of philosophy.
The University of London stands alone in requiring of
medical graduates who aspire to the highest professional
status, that they shall not be ignorant of the laws of the
human mind and of scientific method, the neglect of which
has been fatally avenged upon the progress of medicine ;
anticipating here a reform of medical education that cannot
be far distant. It was not too much to speak of a very
signal recognition of philosophy ; and taking the university
only for what it professes to be, one might say further, that
there is in all this a very felicitous blending of ancient
prescience with modern experience.
But if London stands thus distinguished in philosophical
examination, it is only a reason the more for looking closely
to the philosophical instruction ; which brings us home at
last, because University College, once the London Univer-
sity, claims still to rank first among the instructing bodies.
And in support of the claim there could hardly be better
proof than the fact that, beyond any other, this college has
14 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
maintained in her curriculum the teaching of philosophy.
The fact admits of even stronger statement. As the present
University is more the daughter than the mother of our
College, and certainly owes its breadth of spirit to the same
movement of thought and even the very minds that begot
us, we may consider that a great part of what is best in its
constitution is not so much a something for us to work up
to, as a recognition and expansion of principles that first
were rooted here ; and notably in this matter of philosophy.
For our founders, at a time when the philosophical tradition
had nearly died out at Oxford and Cambridge, and when,
by a curious irony, they could not be more distinguished
from those who sat in the seats of the schoolmen than in
setting up a chair of philosophy to take an 'effective part in
general education, instituted in this place the first chair of
the kind in England. Still, with reference to this chair so
intelligently conceived, one hardly knows, after the changes
and experience of thirty years, how to speak. The large
scheme of the University cannot be said to be very well met
by the energies of a single instructor, especially in its higher
developments. On the other hand, the apathy of our people
for high culture, which has hitherto sadly prevailed against
the generous efforts of the founders and guardians of Uni-
versity College upon all lines, has shown itself quite specially
upon this, to the extent of leaving hardly used the little
teaching-power provided. It is not only a curious, but a
serious thing. Berlin gives employment to some ten
publicly-recognised teachers of philosophy. London, even
after the singularly striking testimony borne by the new
University to the general and special value of the subject,
finds one rather superfluous.1
1 Mr. Mahaffy, writing in the last number of the London Student about
the Dublin University, complains, with great justice, that little account
is taken in England of its progress, and even its very existence. I am
the more sorry that these observations of mine come under this re-
proach, because, upon inquiry, it turns out that no place of education
more deserved notice for its recognition of philosophy. The subject
(only it seerns to be made rather much an affair of book -work) is both
firmly rooted in the ordinary course, and placed fairly on the line for
academic distinctions. The Irish Queen's University also merited a
passing notice for exacting attendance on a philosophical course.
Having had occasion to mention the last number of the London Student,
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 15
Upon this review, hurried and partial as it is, I think
we may say that, while philosophy clearly has lost its old
predominance in liberal instruction from the days when a
change of speculative theory meant an educational revolution,
its varying position from country to country, and its more
or less unsatisfactory position in all, betoken great disagree-
ment and uncertainty about its value as a subject of study!
Germany carries philosophy much the furthest, but one
must go to Germany to hear its general utility scouted with
thorough vigour. Scotland spreads it well, but has little
training for special aptitude. England, at the old university
seats, is only recovering from the habit of total neglect, or
in London has not got much beyond the conception of a
brave ideal. Under these circumstances, let me proceed to
explain how, as I conceive, philosophy, though it stands no
longer where it stood, still has claims to a place in modern
education.
For the declension of philosophical study, reasons are
not far to seek. To take the smaller first, it is plain that,
as the world advances in culture, a literary education must
tend to engage a larger number and increasingly to engross
the mind. This was seen in the later ages of antiquity,
when they became weighted with a great literature. It is
to be seen still more since the Revival of Letters, when the
nations of modern Europe got sudden possession of the
literary relics of the classical peoples, and after a flush of
bewildered admiration, began to pile up fine creations of
their own. In the ancient world, philosophy was more
powerful as an intellectual regimen before the days of wide-
spread literary culture ; and unless modern civilisation is
moving onward to some new catastrophe, mankind can
hardly again be seen in the position of the schoolmen,
hugging for .centuries a few philosophical ideas saved from
a periodical started a few months ago, under the able guidance of Prof.
8eeley and others, to work for the organisation of the higher in-
struction in London, I think it pertinent to add that this (October)
number was the last in every sense. Nothing is, of course, more natural
than the early death of an English educational journal ; but the fate of
this greatly dejects some who were simple enough to fancy that at last
the time had come when such an one might live.
16 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
the flood, until the re-awakening of fancy and literary
taste.
But this is not much against the influence of philosophy.
If the paths of literature, when they open, entice multitudes
to wander down them, the world never contains fewer
difficulties to solve or tends any the more to cease from
breaking in upon the mind's repose. The search for largest
truth, which is philosophy, cannot slacken with the growth
of literary culture and general refinement, unless the race
is falling back ; and if in modern days the old philosophical
highway is trodden by rarer feet, the cause is more probably
that other roads to truth have been opened. You may
easily guess that I am thinking of the multifarious lines of
modern science.
Now, however exclusively the sciences may be under-
stood, or in whatever narrow sense the one word 'Science,
as arrogated for the multitude of modern positive inquiries
(but it means simply knowledge), is opposed to all or any-
thing that has passed under the name of Philosophy, you
shall hear no jealous complaint from me. The man must
be blind indeed, who does not see that sentence has long
gone forth against ancient preconceptions of nature, and that
the special sciences of modern times have availed to give
insight into things that baffled too forward minds in early
days. Has something that men do not call philosophy
come at truth, or say truths, which philosophy upon a
different line tried hard, but failed to reach? I wonder
what philosopher, that is to say, what deepest and widest
truth-seeker, should not there find cause for joy. There
is truth of fact, and truth of manner, and he will always
deserve best, who seeks out anything in the truer way.
Since there is a truer way than once was mainly followed,
of arriving at some knowledge of the vast complex of
nature, in the following of it there lies not only an ex-
planation of the comparative decline of philosophy in the
modern world, but, one can even say, a philosophical justi-
fication. Ancient, scholastic, even seventeenth-century
philosophy, we are not to forget, sought to be physical
science as well. The philosopher Aristotle was, in the
strictest sense, the great scientific authority for ages, until
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 17
he was dethroned by the philosopher Descartes. Both were,
like Locke, Newton, and Harvey, rolled into one ; except
that Locke's philosophy was in some respects better, and
Newton's physics and Harvey's physiology very much better.
The days are gone of a universal oracle like Aristotle ; a
new Thomas, who should dispense to hungry youth all
knowledge, human and divine, would be the Angelic Doctor
indeed. When one thinks with what accumulated labour
of generations, with what painful concentration upon details,
the conceptions that are now set before the scientific
student in any known department of nature have been
spelled out, one need hardly wonder at modern impatience
of philosophy, which, for the external world at least, used to
mean crude generalising, rash deduction, and self-complacent
projection of human fancies and likings.
But was there nothing, then, in that ancient habit of
thought, which, even at the expense of our objective
sciences, gave, in what was called philosophy, a unity to
human knowledge that is strange to a modern ear ? Is it
enough for men — for thinking beings — to burrow, like many,
all their days in holes and corners of the universe, without
trying, or conceiving how they might try, in thought to
take in the whole, — to be moved to ecstasy in counting the
spots upon a butterfly's wing, or the facets of its eye, and
to care nothing for the questions about human knowledge
and human nature underlying all? We agree to protest
against so-called philosophic disdain of things mean, or
facts precise or exact ; but is it everything to ticket
and label all round, or is it the highest to have even
weighed the planets and measured the interspaces of the
stars ?
It is not necessary to go to those who are directly in-
terested to find the negative answer. The labours of a man
like Comte, steeped in objective science, but convinced that
all this random exploring of the last centuries must be
abandoned for a course of wisely-directed intellectual effort,
in view of the .highest human ends, yield it : it is yielded
recently in more than one striking statement of the bounds
set for physical inquiry and avowal of a great region -of
human interest lying beyond. What, if we shall find here
2
18 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
only a recurrence, of a partial kind, to the old and neglected
idea of philosophy ? Let us suppose a number of men, of
wide scientific attainments, to devote themselves not to
carrying further specific lines of investigation, but to knitting
up the multifarious threads of inquiry, to weighing their
relative importance for humanity, and evolving out of each
lessons of method for the benefit of the rest. Such men
— Comte himself is an example — could not, or at all events
would not, be called men of science, but would do a greater
work, in some respects a higher, because a rarer work, than
detail inquiry, and would fairly claim to be called philo-
sophical. Suppose another class of men, less concerned
about external things than the shifting scene of human
thoughts and feelings, to undertake the delicate task of
gaining some intelligent insight into this strangest of
complications ; with this view, to fasten upon all outer
manifestations of consciousness, even more as helps to
conception than as facts, and, both here and in the far
greater number of cases where such help can only be vaguely
had, by analytic reflexion to labour at reducing the acquired
and the complex to the rudimentary and the simple. Such
men might not (except by Comte) be denied, as psychologists,
the name of men of science ; but, as facing the multitude
of difficult questions regarding human nature which, though
not unapproachable from the side of the physical sciences,
can never by men be placed on the same level with physical
questions, their work also gets the name of philosophy.
Now, there always have been some in the number of tradi-
tional philosophers attempting, as far as their light went,
one or both of these functions ; and the functions being
declared necessary in quarters where there can be no sus-
picion of interested feeling, there is already in this a plea
for philosophy beside the sciences.
But now suppose still another class of men — though it
best might be our second class, the psychologists — to be
deeply impressed with a consideration which there is no
reason for not ignoring in practical life, but which is also
so habitually ignored elsewhere as rarely to enter the head
even of men of science — the consideration, namely, that
this great world after all is, and can be, only as it is mentally
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OP STUDY. 19
perceived or conceived, and that it is as idle for men to try
to get out of the mental circle to an existence that is not
thought or somehow experienced, as to overleap their
shadows. Strange as this may appear to some of you, it is
anything but a whim or fancy ; and it has undoubtedly been
the profoundest conviction of many of the greatest minds.
Does it not follow that in carefully studying all that we are
conscious of — not, with the physical inquirer, as things and
facts related to each other in an external world, but as
objects of our thinking — any results we arrive at will have
a permanent and universal validity, whatever be the specific
data started from — will be true of all things, if true of
thinking, and will be a truth' not otherwise to be attained ?
The scorn that is so freely poured upon metaphysical philo-
sophers, without a faintest thought of this, is a very cheap
scorn. If we will think of it, we shall understand very dif-
ferently the efforts of so many searching intellects from that
early Greek time till now ; and yet without prejudice — perhaps
even in truest devotion — to the cause of modern science.
Why did good physical science begin so much later in
the world, and, such as they had it, count in Plato and
Aristotle for so much less, than philosophy? Not, surely,
because the Greek thinkers were wanting in the requisite
intellectual force, or because their philosophy was play ;
but rather because their philosophical thinking sprang more
directly from, and was a more pressing need of, their mental
nature. Why is their philosophy to this day a power in the
world, and why does it worthily engage the labours of the
most vigorous minds, but because it includes wisdom and
far-reaching stretches of thought, which some may refuse
to call truths, but which are worth more, and are more
needed, than bushels of the facts to which the name is
given ? Why is most of their physical science a mere
antiquarian curiosity, or good for little but to point a scien-
tific moral? Because they failed to see how far mere
thinking can go, how sober it ought ever to be ; because
they had not learned that if it will try to cope with the
infinite complexity of nature, it must start from a very
firm ground of experience, and never be weary of alighting
again to test and verify its conclusions.
20 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
There is a difference between not having a right to be,
and straying in the attempt to compass too much. Philo-
sophy strayed thus ; and modern physical science, upon a
hundred lines, had a revenge to take. But now that, by an
ardour in pursuit beyond all praise, and a harvest of results,
intellectual as well as material, scientific inquirers have
brought things to this pass, that nothing is better estab-
lished than the way of the sciences, nothing more certain
than their future, is it not time to drop an opposition that
is full of danger ? If the philosopher erred when he fancied
that from the height of his swift thinking he could take in
the world by glances, the physical inquirer, in seeking
laboriously to make good the error, is not therefore safe.
He works with assumptions, of which he can render no
sufficient account ; and because he cannot, he often works
wastefully. He works without having reflected upon
human ends ; and because he has not, he often works
uselessly. He works by rules which he does not compre-
hend ; and because he does not, he often works astray.
Or, if he can render intelligent account of his Assumptions,
if he has reflected upon human ends, if he does apprehend
the true force of his rules, well for him ; but then he is to
that extent a philosopher. When, in some distant and
happy future, all men of science have become philosophic,
and are as remarkable for depth of insight and width of
view as now for patient and devoted search, it will be time
enough to ask whether philosophy has not wholly passed
into positive knowledge, as positive knowledge will then
be conceived. Meanwhile, there is so much sifting and
criticism of scientific assumptions to be done, and so much
ordering and estimating of scientific results — there is such
need of anticipative thought for holding our experiences
together, and of reflective consideration of our mental life
to settle how and where we stand, that the last thing we
can afford to do without is a philosophy. And, besides, it
is, after all, not a question of philosophy or no philosophy,
but only of good or bad : for, as Aristotle said, men must
philosophise.
You will observe, I here put the case merely upon the
ground of a necessary relation between philosophy and
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 21
every kind of special inquiry ; not, however, that I think it
cannot be argued upon a directer issue. It is not asking
very much of the mind that it should labour to settle the
questions it can raise, or, rather, cannot repress ; and if,
as many are rather suspiciously eager to suggest, the
questions are not to -be settled, we surely have a right to
know the reason why. We cannot go on living, still less
thinking, without stumbling upon numberless difficulties,
leaching even to our very life and thought; and although,
110 doubt, some may choose for themselves not to face them,
there are others who must be allowed to choose 'differently.
Nor is mere settlement of questions everything ; as the
world goes, there is virtue for every generation in the
raising of some : and when comparisons are drawn to the
disadvantage of metaphysical philosophy from the settle-
ment of physical questions, it may be enough, without
retorting upon doubtful passages in the progress, or doubtful
points in the present state, of the sciences, to reply that- it
very much depends upon the kind of questions and the
kind of settlement. On the whole, I venture to submit
that it never was of greater importance than now to recognise
and have taught, under the name of philosophy, the best
possible knowledge regarding the human mind ; which will
range over more than you would suppose, but will include
at least this — an account of the growth and mature mani-
festations of mind in the individual, or psychology ; the
same for the race, which is the history of speculation ; and
in connexion with this or separately, the discussion of all
largest scientific ideas, or Metaphysics ; Logic, or the general
science of proof and discovery of truth ; andiEthics, or the
science of human conduct. To this last, leading on to so
much else, I have only distantly, alluded before, though the
whole case might be rested upon it'; the others are an
intellectual regimen, without which there can be no highest
culture for men, and no true idea either of human power or
of human impotence.
But if philosophy in this sense is still to be taught, it is
plain, in the first place, that there must be opportunities for
making it a subject of special study, were it only to train a
competent body of teachers. Here, in London, this is' one
2'2 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
of the chief things we have to think of; the more, as already
our instruction lags behind the admirable system of examina-
tion I exhibited to you. But the matter has a wider aspect.
Now that our people are being shaken from their intellectual
trance, if London should, as with its resources it might, be-
come the centre of the world's learning and science, greater
would be the need that human thought should here, in philo-
sophy, labour hardest to grasp and guide the whole. For
all our restlessness, we are taunted with being a narrow-
visioned people ; and we cannot deny even to ourselves that
our achievements are not won without a waste of power,
moral, intellectual, and material, enough to make the fortune
of many a more frugal, or better-instructed race. The taunt,
with our past in view, cannot have more than a passing truth.
As for the waste of power, that is sheer senselessness, and
must be stopped. Let our instruction be made the best, as
it still easily may ; let us put aside this late-born horror of
theory, and be less afraid of thought for having sometimes
strayed, assured that no hard thinking is ever quite lost.
Our love of facts and devotion to practical results will not
suffer for being so enlightened ; while all the experience we
have heaped up, and must ever continue laboriously to bring
together, may perhaps yield an intellectual satisfaction to
which there are few among us not strangers.
But it is as a subject of general study that I am more con-
cerned now to recommend philosophy, in view of our actual
teaching-resources, and to an audience like the present.
The chair of philosophy and logic in this college was, as I
said, founded to take part in the work of general, liberal
instruction, and singly cannot, except very feebly, overtake
special functions of the kind now hinted at. Before an
audience, too, composed of students still at the stage of
general training, I may best close my remarks by showing,
as far as time will permit, the advantages of philosophy as a
general preparation for the chief special pursuits that in the
end must engage the liberally instructed. I do not stop to
give reasons for the selection ; but you will hardly call it
unfair, if we confine ourselves to the scholar, the lawyer,
the man of science, and the physician.
The scholar is a somewhat indefinite title, and may mean
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. '23
little or much. It means least when it designates the
scholarly man of traditional English growth, who, being
anything or nothing besides, does not seek in his scholarship
more than a means of fine recreation or a standard of liter-
ary taste. Him we may pass by. It means something very
serious, as suggesting a teacher of youth ; which it does with
a frequency in proportion to the prominence given to lan-
guage, and particularly the classical tongues, in mental
training. Putting here aside the great educational question
now pending between languages and sciences, I will only say
that, more especially if instruction is to be mainly linguistic
and literary, the teacher will do well to have been led by
psychological study to reflect upon the subject of education,
and to conceive that at least the manner of instructing dare
not be unscientific. The scholar may, however, be more.
With the measure of insight that has fallen to him, he may
set himself to explore all mental growths and creations of
the race in language, literature, art, polity, religion. He
may put together all his thought and research in a history
of some people, or period, or phase of mental effort ; perhaps
calling up the past in order to win from it moral and politi-
cal lessons for his own time, more impressive than any ab-
stract teaching. From words or myths he may try to distil
subtle truths about pre-historic races. You may call this
science : it is, in any case, putting erudition to its highest
uses. Now one can call up such and such a scholar or
historian, in whom conscientiousness, labour and rhetorical
gifts are nullified by an incapacity to appreciate the weight
of conflicting evidence, to comprehend the springs of human
action, to conceive of human destiny with large vision, for
mere want of logical training and familiarity with the analy-
sis of the psychologist and the wide conceptions of the philo-
sopher. One can think of such and such another, in the
present and past, whose insight and free range of thought
stand first among their high qualities, and by themselves
would be ascribed to the influence of philosophic studies.
We have had great scholars in England at different times.
Let me put a question. How comes it that of the im-
mense number of English students, who were classical or
nothing, trained in the last seventy or eighty years, so few
24 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
have contributed to the remarkable philological achieve-
ments of this century ? Till you bring a more likely ex-
planation, I should ascribe it to the long eclipse of philosophy
and the philosophical spirit at the old universities.
The pursuit of law, which some of you will follow, is a
very striking case for remarking the need and advantage of
a general philosophical training. Nothing can be more ap-
parent than the connexion of positive law through juris-
prudence with morals and psychology. Nor is there anything
more, or at least that might become more, commonplace,
than the fact of the pointed application of syllogistic theory
in legal pleadings and decisions, especially under a system
of judge-made law like ours. But our own law, in its
present condition, is also quite otherwise an object of
interest to a philosophically trained mind. Sharing with
other systems a number of hazy notions regarding law of
nature and the like, which, if generated by a lax, can be
cleared up only by a rigid, philosophy, it continues, unlike
others, to be twisted by haphazard growth into monstrosity.
The simplest rules of logical definition, which, if in other
matters, men did not observe, or try to observe, there never
could be science or knowledge, our lawyers alone seem to
claim the right to disregard. They have gone on through
centuries referring, with a fatal ingenuity, the multitude of
new cases to an inadequate stock of original conceptions
loose in themselves ; and the consequence is, that a good
definition of a legal term is now hardly to be found. There
is no work more pressing at the present day, or more
fitted to fire ambition, than the scientific reconstruction of
English law ; and the student, eager to aid, will not find
better training than a course of philosophical instruction,
impressing the conditions of all rigorous thinking, and accus-
toming the mind to move with steadiness among largest
conceptions.
Upon the relation of philosophy to the sciences I have
already spoken at length, and touch the subject here again
only to say a word for theoretical science as a professional
pursuit. It is a feature of British science that it is left in
great measure to the spare energies and chance leisure of
busy practical men ; much to whose credit it undoubtedly
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. '25
is that so many are found willing to undergo labour of the
kind. But, either on a comparison of results, or upon the
least reflexion, it is impossible to regard such a state of
things as satisfactory ; and at no point do we suffer a
greater waste of power. To stop the waste, indeed, is
difficult, until by developing public instruction we provide,
us in some other countries, a large number of modest places
to be held on the simple and effective condition of requiring
for scientific work done merely a free and open exposition
of it. It is not, however, that there is a want of actual
resources, if one might here venture to suggest what a
power the old universities have long had of stemming the
evil, by affixing such a condition to only a few fellowships,
diverted from being extravagant prizes for past under-
graduate work. Suppose the thing had been done — rigidly
done — from the days of Newton : where might we not have
beeiL now? The sooner something is still done, there or
here, the better for our national reputation ; and in propor-
tion as we couple a philosophical culture with the special
training of the scientific class, a point in which it is still
open to us to surpass other nations, the better will it be for
•our science — and our philosophy.
The medical profession, concerning which I engaged to
say a last word in the present connexion, has specially
distinguished itself in the way just mentioned of working
at pure science amid laborious practical duties ; so that
after all the name of physician is not greatly misapplied.
Nevertheless it is asserted, and not denied, that our
medical men, as a class, come greatly short in the matter of
preliminary general training, scientific, and even literary.
One can urge the charge altogether with less hesitation
because a change for the better has already set in ; and, in
An assembly like this, there is least of all need to cast about
for a mild expression of it, when by their presence here
the future medical students of your number take the best
means of eluding the reproach. Even the practice of such,
however, will bear to be enlightened, to say nothing more
•of the immense stride the others have to take ; .and en-
lightened it may be by including in their general studies
here the philosophical discipline offered in our course of
20 PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY.
instruction. It is little short of mockery to ask, what can
be the use of such a discipline to a medical man ? When
existence is hanging by a thread, or is endangered by a.
subtle malady, whose secret is betrayed by few outward
symptoms and cannot be approached by a rough experience,
is a man to resign himself to one who has not the faintest
idea of what is good evidence, and never has bestowed a
single serious thought upon the mental moods that are
more than half our human life ? If it were true that logic
and psychology will not give much help, the case is still
one where people can ill afford to reject a very little ; and
what logic and psychology can do for a mind that comes
schooled in them to the discharge of functions the most
delicate and momentous, those who neglect them are not
the be'st able to say. You who are so fortunate- as not to-
have been thrown prematurely amid the distracting variety
of medical studies, which is the only good excuse the others
can offer for the neglect, are those of whom it may be asked
that they should give the discipline a fair trial. The
present experience is unfortunately not great, either
at home or abroad — this, indeed, is the very point com-
plained of; but, as far as it goes, it justifies me in saying
that you are little likely in after days to regret any trouble
less.
It has been assumed in these remarks that philosophical
knowledge is not only good to have, but is best got from a
course of systematic instruction. I must not close without
a word about that assumption. When an unpopular subject
has its claims thus pleaded, there will be many ready
enough to concede them, .because it -can 'always be said .the
knowledge is of a kind that may be trusted to come of itself
or with other knowledge ; and logic in particular, as it is
the philosophical discipline with the most obvious and
urgent claims, is perpetually being shelved in this very
plausible and convenient fashion. The subterfuge is a little
too transparent ; it is, besides, not very safe, for logic is not
the only abstract doctrine that can suffer. Whatever may
be known, or has to be practised, is better for being ex-
plicitly set forth; in that way far more can be known, and
bad practice is rendered more difficult. And this is neither
PHILOSOPHY AS A SUBJECT OF STUDY. 27
to deny, what is no doubt a fact, that some heads need very
little formal instruction, nor is it to assert that everything
that can be explicitly set forth ought to be made a part of
general education. But there are few for whom Philosophy
has no lessons, and I should hope it will now appear to you
a subject of study with very peculiar claims upon all.
THE ENGLISH MIND.1
AFTEE expounding, by the mouth of a feigned Oxford
student, one of the most characteristic products of English
thought in this century — the logical system of John Stuart
Mill — M. Taine proceeds, in his brilliant French way, thus
to catch up his youthful champion of ' English Positivism,'
as he calls it : —
" An abyss of chance and an abyss of ignorance. The
view is gloomy : no matter, if it is true. At all events, this
theory of science is the theory of English science. Seldom,
I grant you, has a thinker better summed up in his doctrine
the practice of his country ; seldom has a man better
represented by his negations and his discoveries the bounds
and the reach of his race. The processes of which this
thinker makes up science are those in which you surpass
all others, and the processes which he shuts out of science
are those in which you come short more than any. He
describes the English mind when he thinks he is describing
the human mind. There lies his glory, but there also lies
his weakness. In your idea of knowledge there is a gap
which, being constantly added to itself, becomes at last this
yawning gulf of chance from whose depth, according to him,
things come forth, and this gulf of ignorance on whose brink,
according to him, our knowledge must halt. And see what
comes of it. By cutting off from science the knowledge of
first causes, that is to say, of things divine, you drive a man
to become sceptical, positive, utilitarian, if his head is hard,
or mystical, fanatical, methodistical, if he has a lively
imagination. In this great unknown void which you set
beyond our little world, the hot-headed or the melancholy
can lodge -all their dreams; and the men of cool judgment,
1 A Lecture delivered at the Russell Institute in April, 1871.
THE ENGLISH MIND. 2£
in despair of gaining any footing there, have nothing left
them but to fall back upon the search for practical receipts
that may better our condition. It seerns to me that oftenest
the two dispositions meet in the same English head. The
religious spirit and the positive spirit live there side by side
and apart. That makes an odd mixture, and I confess I
like better the way in which the Germans have reconciled
faith and science."
It is cleverly said — too cleverly, for if in all generalities
there is apt to lurk a mental snare, there is especial danger
in the attempt to dash off with points of this sort the character
of the manifold thinking of an old historic people. In phrases
less sparkling, but of almost identical import, one of those
very Germans has sought to describe the quality of French
thought, and the names of many Frenchmen, Pascal for one,
rise at the words. Nor, again, have the Germans succeeded
so very perfectly at the task of reconciliation — certainly, not
Kant, the greatest of them all. And yet it must be granted
that those telling sentences embody an opinion of the
English mind that does prevail abroad, and sometimes
finds vent at home. As represented by our intellectual
leaders, we pass for being gifted with much practical sense,
with much insight into the relation of means to ends or
interest in the sort of knowledge that gives immediate power
over things; but are declared to be singularly wanting in
elevation of thought or passion for the merely true, and to
be utterly impatient alike of far-reaching principles and of
rigorously drawn-out conclusions. The Germans deny us
their ineffable Geist ; the French deny us their inexorable
logic. It is freely allowed that we have done considerable
things in the positive investigation of nature or of external
human relations, like those that come into political economy.
It is not denied that somehow, with all our devotion to
utilitarian knowledge, we have managed to preserve a vigour
and freshness of imagination, whence has sprung a poetical
literature as rich and lofty as any the world has seen ;
though it is some consolation to our critics to think that
they alone can appreciate its worth. What is denied, as
here by M. Taine in the earlier part of his oracular
utterance, is that we are a people of ideas, to whom simple
W THE ENGLISH MIND.
insight is the first and highest. Or it is sometimes more
bluntly put, that we have no philosophy.
The charge is not, indeed, one of old date. Time was,
not very long ago, when the character of an intellectually
forward race was the iast that would have been withheld
from us. It would not have been gainsaid by the French
who, for near a century, gloried in following upon the
track of Locke and Newton. Neither was it grudged
by the Germans, who about the same time were not only
cultivating their taste upon English models before entering
upon their own great era of literary creation, but received
also, though some of their descendants have forgotten
the debt, their most effective impulse towards philosophic
thought from Locke again and from Hume. No higher
than to the time of influence of the new German
philosophy, begun by Kant less than a century ago, can be
traced the origin of the opinion that we fall short as a people
in philosophical apprehension ; and of course the weight of
the opinion must depend on the credit maintained by that
philosophy. Now it is a fact that in this present generation
the rising thinkers, both German and French, tend more
and more to come back to the intellectual point of view so
scornfully decried as English by their fathers. But let that
pass. Enough, for the present, that the charge as currently
urged is seen to be not over-deeply supported. What force
there is or is not in it, we may make out upon a line of
inquiry of our own — a line that shall be mainly historical nor
that of short reach.
Let it however first be understood that by English is here
meant in the broadest sense British, inclusive of Irish and
Scotch. The chief effect of the extension, so far as regards
the modern period of history, is to bring into the reckoning
a number of thinkers that have given fame to the northern
part of the island in the last 150 years ; but to exclude
the sister-country would, within the same time, throw
out no less a figure than Bishop Berkeley, who, though of
English extraction, was in Ireland bom and bred. It may
indeed seem questionable to include philosophers hailing
from beyond the Tweed,.; for did not his majesty King
-George III., in the interest of English common-sense, for-
THE ENGLISH MIND. 31
swear and renounce ' Scotch Metaphysics ' ? or, if that be
not decisive, has not Mr. Buckle shown that all Scotsmen
reason on a method the exact opposite of that which has
become almost identified with the English name — and
everybody knows that in philosophy the method is every-
thing? Notwithstanding, I take leave to submit that there
is no opposition between the English and Scotch minds ;
that there is no difference in their habit of thought, or
rather in their mode of expressing thought — for it amounts
to no more — that is not explicable from quite minor
peculiarities in the social conditions of the two countries ;
that in the objects of their intellectual interest and the
fundamental lines of their method there is a marked
agreement ; and, therefore, that the present inquiry must
extend to both. No proof of these positions can be offered
now, though a single point may be noted in passing. The
modern Scotch thinkers, with rare exceptions, have been,
like the German, professors, enjoying, in their own measure,
the stimulus of a free university system. The repre-
sentative philosophers of England, on the other hand, have
been, with hardly an exception, non-academic in position,
or even, many of them, anti-academic in feeling. It is a
fact of no small significance, though it would be misunder-
stood if taken to mean that English thinking is by nature
a mere reflexion of practical life. There was a time, long
past indeed, when in England also the highest thought of
the country found its utterance in the teaching of the
universities, and such a time may come again. Nay, are
there not signs that the day of professors is once more at
hand, if not already upon us ?
In gauging, historically, the philosophical performance
of the English mind, those who rate it low and those who
rate it high err alike, as it seems to me, in contracting the
vision too much. Always it is presumed that the first note
was struck by the famous Chancellor less than three centuries
ago — the note that has been taken up and with mere
variations repeated in the generations since ; that, while the
fundamental character of English thinking was once for all
determined then, it was not at all determined till then ; that
before Bacon there was no philosophical thought in England,
32 THE ENGLISH MIND.
or none at least that could be called English. And doubtless
no injustice is thereby intended to our country in particular,
since no claim to a longer intellectual history is put in for
any of the other great philosophic countries of modern
Europe, unless, perhaps, for Italy ; what thinking there was
before the seventeenth century being, in the main, held the
property of the one universal Western Church, in whose
service all feeling of nationality was overborne by a master
sentiment of devotion to the ecclesiastical system. But
however plausible this view of pre-modern thought, it is
decidedly superficial, no very profound inquiry being needed
to discover national character, already in the dim light of
that middle age and despite the crushing influence of the
Church, asserting itself under the monk's cowl not otherwise,
save more feebly, than in the later time, when the nations
were free to go each their own way. Or, if there were a,
doubt on this point in the case of other nations, at all
events, so far as England is concerned, there should be none.
I proceed first of all to show, as briefly as may be, how
actively the English or British intellect was at work in an
age long before Bacon and towards a result which he and
his followers are commonly thought to have been the first to
conceive. Should it appear that men from these islands
were the most forward spirits in that early time and led the
van of European thought, the fact is one not to be forgotten
in an attempt to take the intellectual measure of our
country. If, further, it appear that the British thinkers
were the first to break down a system of thought which
British thinkers had been among the first to build up, and
in so preparing the way of modern thought took ground in
the manner of their better-known compatriots of a later day,
the fact is one to be carefully impressed. I find the most
distinct evidence that our people was from the first to be
seen pressing forward in the intellectual race with a clear
notion of what it would be at. No nation has kept more
steadily to its line of thought, and that is not denied ; but,
also, none perhaps has thought so persistently. We seem
to have had a line before any other modern people.
The scholastic philosophy, so greatly derided in the
eighteenth century by those whom it no longer affected,
THE ENGLISH MIND. 33
and who for the most part knew nothing of the object of
their scorn ; so fiercely opposed in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries by those whose whole mental action
was an open revolt against its authority ; but in still earlier
centuries not less passionately espoused and extravagantly
esteemed than it has ever been resisted or scorned — is the
name for a body of thought worked out and a method of
thinking pursued in more or less irregular fashion by
ecclesiastics in the West of Europe during some six centuries
until the fifteenth. The work of clerics for an avowed
theological purpose, it yet covers all the philosophic activity
of Christendom in those ages, because the Church — I mean
the Western Church, for the Eastern was idle — drew to her-
self, trained and used all the thinking power of the countries
under her sway. We are now perhaps in a position to
judge of this philosophy, or at least can do so with better
knowledge than was had in the eighteenth century and
with more impartiality than could be felt in the seventeenth.
That it was one of the highest achievements of the human
mind, cannot be said. Though it took as much time in the
working out as Greek philosophy and modern philosophy
put together, it must count in the whole history of mental
endeavour for greatly less than either. Wanting the reality
and exactness of modern positive science and the depth of
modern philosophic insight, it was not less devoid of the
genial freshness and originality of Hellenic thought. What
principle of growth it ever exhibited it was largely beholden
for to the influence of Greek ideas, while itself had to be
thrust aside to make way for modern knowledge. Neverthe-
less there is another side to scholasticism, — one that has been
far too little regarded by its detractors, and has moreover
escaped the notice of most philosophical historians, while
for obvious reasons it is not brought into relief by Catholic
teachers who still in these days think with the schoolmen
and accept their philosophy as valid and unsurpassed. Sad
as it is to think of the huge break in the path of advance of
the human intellect — of some ten or more centuries, each a
hundred years long, though in stalking over them we forget
it, lying all so barren of intellectual fruit between the few
bright centuries far off in which the tiny race of Greeks at
3
34 THE ENGLISH MIND.
a corner of Europe raised so many deepest questions and
went far to settling some, and the two or three busy
centuries close at hand in which the leading European
nations side by side, first having come back to the old
Hellenic point of view, have so widely extended the bounds
of knowledge in the way of positive science and so profoundly
scanned its bases in the way of philosophy — yet can we not
blame schoolmen for being born into that middle age. But,
rather, because we know in what a night the light of Greek
thought after flickering more and more feebly in the first
centuries of our era was finally quenched, while the nations
were locked in death-wrestle and the great world-empire,
falling into pieces or rent asunder, was being hewn into the
first rough shapes of modern nationalities, should we deem
it something that thinking began again at all, and more that,
in thinking as they could not but think from the ground of
blind faith where they stood, priests and monks should have
been found not loath but eager to turn full upon their faith the
light of old reason as it again broke slowly in from outer parts.
All the world has heard of scholasticism as an oppressive
system of pedantic belief : it has still to be known as a
system of rationalism struggling to be. Few have any
notion of the seething mental activity, fatally narrowed, no
doubt, in its objects, of the eager questioning and even the
muttered scepticism, buried away in the depths of that
credulous age.
Let us take scholasticism for what it was — the best that the
European mind in a hard time was able intellectually to
effect, and see, then, what was the part played in its de-
velopment first and last by countrymen of ours. When
about the year 800, Charlemagne, having brought some-
thing like order out of confusion in the West, made his
grandiose attempt to organise European society upon the
basis of a double-headed supremacy of Emperor and Pope,
and bethought him of setting up monastic schools to soften
his rude people, it was in the old-established seminary
of York that he sought for a director of public in-
struction and found his man in Alcuin ; never at the worst
had there been a time when at scattered points over
these islands a feeble flame of learning had not been kept
THE ENGLISH MIND. 35
burning. When two generations later a thinker ot real
eminence appeared, the first in four centuries since the time
of St. Augustin, and after all that interval began a second
era of Christian thought as St. Augustin had closed the
first, starting the problem of a rational interpretation of the
faith which the school-philosophy was a long and weary
series of efforts to resolve, the thinker was John Scotus
Erigena sprung from the north country or from Ireland.
When two centuries more had passed of blank confusion
in Church and State, in the midst of which Christendom
well-nigh went down, and again a beginning was made of
intellectual progress, with better chance of continuance, the
centre this time being Paris and the leading spirits French-
men, on no field whether of wordy dialectic or mystic con-
templation did our countrymen hang back ; and when in
the twelfth century the first race of scholastic wranglers,
subtle as they were, had by reason of their failure to con-
firm the faith won hardly more credit with the Church than
they can gain respect from us, with their clearly manifested
impotence to break open new paths of knowledge or even to
reconquer of themselves the domain held by the Greeks, an
Englishman, as was fitting, John of Salisbury, stood for-
ward to speak of leaving verbal quibbles for practice, at
the same time that he pointed to Aristotle as the effective
guide to larger fields of knowledge. So, again, when with
the thirteenth century the Church after its long struggle
with the civil power from the time of Hildebrand to the
time of Innocent III. had corne forth supreme, had arrayed
its standing armies of mendicant friars, and founding regular
universities was prepared to uphold and spread its power
by dominating education and turning to its own uses the
weapons of worldly wisdom, specially that philosophy of
Aristotle which as it gradually became known from infidel
Arab sources was wrested by some to infidel purposes —
another Englishman it was, Alexander of Hales, who first
struck into that path of systematic reconciliation of faith
and reason — of Church-dogma in its most particular form as
elaborated in twelve centuries of Christian effort, and secular
knowledge in its widest extent as compassed by the encyclo-
paedic labours of the great heathen sage, which was con-
36 THE ENGLISH MIND.
summated after the middle of the century by Thomas
Aquinas. And once more, when in the Angelic Doctor's
rational expression of the Church's faith the work of Scho-
lasticism seemed to be accomplished, as, accordingly, that
expression has ever since then preserved an authoritative
character in the Romish Communion, by whom should the
concordat be marred almost as soon as framed but by John
Duns Scotus, and in a few years more be quite torn up but
by William of Ockham, both Franciscan monks from this
country ? Nor, though he stands aloof from the main
current of scholastic thought which here has been traced,
is the name of another Franciscan, from the thirteenth
century, to be passed over : Roger Bacon, almost the only
man of his age, to whom the world of nature seemed, as it
seems to us, the great quarry of human intellect, rather than
a realm of evil from which the faithful, banned into it for a
while, cannot too much turn away their eyes, may fitly close
our roll of English thinkers in the middle age.
It should now be clear, even in such a rough tracing, that
from the earliest appearance of modern national divisions and
during a full half of their history, men of our race played a part
of quite singular prominence in the general intellectual move-
ment of Europe. Almost might one say that as long as the
movement, from taking place within the fold of the univer-
sal Church, was in the strict sense a collectively European
one, the start at every new stage of the course was due to
the initiative of a British schoolman. And there is more to
be said. As scholasticism is now of most interest as itself
but a stage — not a bright one — in the whole intellectual
course of humanity, what is of prime concern is how the
passage out of it into the next was made ; and at this crisis,
while men of English name become more prominent than
ever, a certain distinctive character begins to be apparent in
their philosophic action. The prominence before, when
mediaeval thought was beginning from nothing, might be
accidental ; the English were a little better schooled, per-
chance because they lay out at sea, and then, as often later,
had comparative peace, while the continent was in trouble.
But long after, when an elaborate system of thought had been
worked out. which, though it realised an ideal strained after
THE ENGLISH MIND. 87
through many generations, was no sooner an accomplished
fact, than it must have seemed as a ponderous net thrown
over free intellectual effort — that then the men who sought to
cast it off, should all have sprung from the same soil, looks
to be other than accident. Such action must have been
natural to thinkers of that origin. Now, besides Koger
Bacon, who for his interest in external nature is at once
recognised as of English breed, and is readily supposed as
in conflict with the spirit of his age, the schoolmen that
broke away from the system that satisfied the highest
aspirations of Churchmen in the thirteenth century are the
two, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. It is
worth while to look a little more closely into their mutiny.
The younger, William of Ockham, is the more impor-
tant figure. Scotus, indeed, the terrible dialectician who
refined and distinguished beyond all human belief to the ex-
tent of some twelve folio volumes before he was laid in his
early grave at the age of thirty-four, was a most devoted son
of the Church ; and when he disturbed the settlement of
Aquinas by denying that there could be a rational insight
into the mysteries of the faith, did it expressly with the view
of aggrandising the authority of the Church in the person
of the Pope. With William of Ockham it was otherwise.
Monk as he was, that rebellious spirit was the sworn enemy
of papal pretensions, and though he also professed to bow
in matters of faith to a Church whose creed he pronounced
incapable of rational proof, in him, it hardly can be doubted,
we come upon one, perhaps the first within the Church,
more concerned, like a mere philosopher, to draw the line
between science and ignorance, than as a theologian solicit-
ous about establishing the faith. And for certain, in this
English Franciscan, still deep in the middle age, three long
centuries before the day of Bacon and Hobbes, we can des-
cry, through the veil of his scholastic jargon, a thinker
mentally akin to these — to Hobbes especially — in a fashion
of which they in the indiscriminating impatience of their
opposition to the scholastic system little dreamt. One might
even marvel that 300 years should have had to drag out their
slow length before the advent of modern thought in the
seventeenth century, when this English schoolman in the
38 THE ENGLISH MIND.
fourteenth had so signally cleared the way for it, did not one
gather but too unmistakably from the history of effective
human thought, broken from the ancient to the modern
time for 1300 instead of 300 years, that among the forces
which in their shock make general human history the force
of mere intelligence is far from being the most powerful.
Much had to happen in the great world before philosophical
ideas from which Ockham's were not far removed in sub-
stance, however much in form, could be enunciated so as to
pass into the train of modern intellectual life ; or before
Lord Bacon could amid the applause of men preach that
experimental investigation of nature for trying to practise
which Friar Bacon in the thirteenth century had to sit long
years in a dungeon and endure the bitterness of neglect.
The fact notwithstanding remains memorable to us, that in
the earlier time English minds were impelled as by some
strong national instinct to work towards the far distant
future ; for it was not less the same instinct, because in Roger
Bacon it assumed the guise of a craving after free search into
nature, while in Duns Scotus it betrayed itself as an extra-
vagant supernaturalism overshadowing science, and in
William of Ockham it took the form of a critical scepticism
looking askance upon theology. In all three it was a prin-
ciple of opposition to the attempt to determine dogmatically
how things must be, to measure the universe by a crude
rational system. It was as if Roger Bacon said : Let not
man by mere thinking or superficial deduction dream of
penetrating to the inmost recesses of nature ; as if Scotus
said : Let not man dream of thinking out a highest rea-
son of things — such he must take on faith ; finally, as if
William of Ockham said : Let man be content to inquire
within the limit of his powers, and let him mind his steps
even there. But to English ears that is a familiar strain ;
for it is the strain in which the leaders of English modern
thought have spoken.
Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume — such in the
modern period is the succession of great names unbroken
for 150 years, which represents the eagerness and persistence
of philosophical effort in England ; which represents also, as
I think, with a singular completeness and consistency, the
THE ENGLISH MIND. 39
various possibilities of English thinking-power. Is it meant,
that there are none, — that there never have been any, — among
us, who renounce all such intellectual leadership ? Is it meant
that contemporary with these there were no other, — there
were not many other, — names worthy to take rank by the side
of them ? Or, once more, is it meant that in the hundred
years since Hume, we have been content to let him and
these his predecessors think for us, and have not gone
beyond them in logical method, in psychological analysis,
in moral prescription, or in grasp of philosophical principles?
Nothing of all that is meant. But it is meant that in every
generation the thinkers or the philosophic writers amongst
us who stand up for other principles than these in the main
agree in representing or who acknowledge other masters,
seem to rise and pass, leaving few traces of their work
behind ; that in the time of these, other names of repute
are cast into the shade by them ; and that in the later
time the great advances that have been made in every
field of philosophic thought, have been made so much
upon the line and in the spirit of their inquiries — even
the thinkers of the Scottish school having loudly vowed
allegiance to Bacon — that it is needless, for estimating
the scope and character of English thinking, to come down
farther than to Hume. Hume's importance, in closing the
series, lies in the fact that, till he appeared, the ques-
tioning faculty of the English mind, in its full subtlety
and daring, stood unrevealed. William of Ockham had
questioned boldly, but the memory of him perished amid the
ruin that he wrought, and modern thought proceeded with-
out the least regard to his foregone and forgotten scepticism.
In Hume the revelation was such that no philosophical
construction, since his time, in England can pretend to
stability, if made without heed to his critical scrutiny of the
grounds of human knowledge, while, on the other hand, any
construction that has been raised beyond his power to over-
throw cannot be very unstable. This is but another way of
saying over again that later English work in philosophy
—superior though it perhaps is to the work of those earlier
thinkers — may for our present purpose be discounted. Now
the five thinkers named from Bacon to Hume, whatever
40 THE ENGLISH MIND.
their difference of individual character and aims, display a
greater general similarity of intellectual vision than can be
matched, for such a succession of first-rate minds, from the
history of any other modern people. The contrast presented
by the course of thought in other countries is indeed quite
remarkable. Thus in France the high speculation of the
seventeenth century gave place in the eighteenth to obser-
vation of the soberest cast, this in turn yielding to higher
speculation than ever in the nineteenth, till in those latest
years inquiry of a positive sort has again begun to prevail.
In Germany though there have been no such Gallic revolu-
tions in the philosophic any more than in the political
sphere, but rather the great systems of thought, as they
have succeeded each other, appear singularly uniform in
character, yet upon a closer view the distance is seen to be
enormous from the dogmatism of Leibniz to the critical
spirit of Kant, or again from Kant's sober reserve to the
stupendous confidence of Hegel ; while after the lapse of 150
years from the time of Leibniz, a general change of face
may be said to have been made at last. No change of face
is visible throughout the course of English philosophy, and
we may truly express its general character in trying to
express the common thought of our 6ve representative
thinkers. That human knowledge is a deposit from particular
experiences ; that it is strictly limited by the narrowness of
human intelligence, which means that the sources of ex-
perience are in number fixed and that not great ; that it is
not more sharply defined outwards than it needs to be
carefully elaborated within ; that any attempt at extension
of it, which is theorising, must never be more than a
temporary anticipation of experience, to stand or fall as
verification can or cannot be found ; that it is to be sought
after chiefly for the power it gives of bending the nature of
things to human ends, as these can be best conceived ; that
where attainable it is to be sought absolutely without heed
of human prejudice or authority ; but that beyond nature
which is thus and not otherwise to be known there is a
region of the supernatural the relation of which to nature is
not apprehensible by human reason and which -altogether
is to be accepted on faith. Such seem to be the main ideas
THE ENGLISH MIND. 41
of these English philosophers. It is not that all were put
forward into equal prominence by each thinker, for the
different aims of each could not in the same way be furthered,
and the conception of some of the five was more profound
than of the others ; but this may be said, that the most
coldly secular, the most sceptical, minds among them re-
cognised, or made as if they recognised, beyond the sphere
of natural experience and knowledge a sphere of super-
natural interest, while the least worldly-minded of them —
a,nd one there was of almost faultless sanctity of soul — had
for science an eye as sharply critical and a view as practical
as any of their fellows. Of that mystic enthusiasm which
when it is not impatient of all special knowledge substitutes
a vain imagining for the laborious work of observation and
reasoning, less is to be found in Berkeley than in any other
saint. Of that mere worldly concern which is begotten of an
interest in massing the facts and searching out the laws of
external nature, or in tracing the growth of mind in its
dependence upon external conditions, as little is to be found
in Bacon or in Locke as in any other empirical thinkers.
Or of professed, and perhaps real, regard for a sphere of
interest surmised beyond the mundane region, especially
when it is considered how inexorably they confine -the mind
to the knowledge of mere phenomena, there is not more to be
seen in any minds of secular cast than in Hobbes and Hume.
In all five the likeness of common feature to later English
thinkers as well as to those early schoolmen, called up to-
night from their sleep of centuries, is beyond dispute ; and
with their philosophic work in view we may now proceed, in
•conclusion, to draw out one or two of the more -predominant
aspects of English thought.
In the first place, then, no philosophy has come to terms,
like the English, with the positive sciences ; and that should
be held a note of honour, if philosophy, as opposed to special
science, claims to direct all human energies because it con-
sciously comprehends them ; for what cannot be doubted is,
that the positive investigation of nature is the special work
of modern times — the task to which we are irrevocably
•committed now, .as to it we were -irresistibly driven from
the first. As little can it be doubted that English philo-
42 THE ENGLISH MIND.
sophic thinking is of the cast here indicated. Bacon's
philosophy remains the stirring trumpet-call to modern
scientific action, even when we hold it, as we must, by no
means the true plan of campaign. Hobbes's philosophy
is a premature attempt to be itself a body of the special
sciences, ordered upon a principle and directed towards a
practical end. Locke, with his perfect modesty, holds it
for himself ' ambition enough to be employed as an under-
labourer clearing the ground a little ' for ' master-builders,'
as he calls them, of the strain of Boyle and Newton. So
Hume, when in lofty phrase he aspires to 'march up directly
to the capital or centre of the sciences, to human nature itself,'
and master that in his philosophy, has but this in view, that
men may thence sally forth to make wiser and surer con-
quests in those fields of special science lying all about. And
Berkeley, the pure spirit, breathing the air of mountain-tops,
after the fancy of some ; the moon-struck destroyer of the
solid frame of earth according to the indignant or con-
temptuous common-sense of others — why, he, indeed, is
at war with the men of science — Newton and hia
following — but only because of the rash liberties which,
as it seems to him, they presume to take with the natural
world of fact, and their precipitate theorising when ex-
perience should be taken as all in all. Now, with this
attitude of English philosophers towards the laborious
work on the fields of natural science, contrast for one
moment the impatience of Leibniz, and Hegel's haughty
disdain of the ' barbarian ' Newton and his ' pitiful ' ex-
perimenting. Whether the famous German judged rightly,,
as he certainly judged from a height than which no man
has ever mounted higher, this is not the place to consider :
he would be a bold man who should rashly say that he
judged wrongly. But it may not be amiss to mention that
in Hegel's own university of Berlin, within ear-shot of the
academic chair whence his contempt of all English think-
ing and science for long years was wont to be poured forth,.
I have heard Newton spoken of as the greatest head the
world has ever seen. Whether, again, this was the right judg-
ment I can as little here venture to decide. Yet that it should
have been pronounced in the very citadel of German specu-
THE ENGLISH MIND. 43
lation by a man of the first scientific mark does seem a
rather striking tribute to the English habit of philosophic
thought with which science of the Newtonian stamp so
freely passes current.
But again this English philosophic interest in the positive
sciences has had one striking effect — it has reacted upon the
method of philosophic inquiry itself and tended to make
this scientific : unless it be that we rather have here two
collateral results of one natural disposition in the English
mind. By scientific method in philosophy, I mean that in
our highest efforts to comprehend in unity of thought the
vast universe of being and to divine the origin and destiny
of humanity — which is philosophy — we seek to proceed not
by way of arbitrary speculation but from a basis of evident
fact, we seek even more to bring all our reasonings face to
face with fact as their final test, and always act as if we
believed that to no one man can it happen that he should
tear aside the veil and once for all lay bare the hidden
mystery of existence, but that only by the united labour
of many men and the continuous labour of many generations
of men, as in the modern science of external nature, may
the corner of the veil perchance be lifted higher and higher
up. Now the philosopher's facts are facts of mind, or all
possible facts taken, as all ultimately can and must be, as
they are mentally experienced : and when such are scienti-
fically investigated, there is psychology. This then is a
second point : English philosophy is psychological. How
true this is, and also how distinctive the description is,
nothing could be easier than to show. From the time of
Locke at least, if not of Hobbes, English thinking has
been nothing if not psychological. And so, when other
countries — France in the last century notably, and more
than once in this, Germany in the last century also, though
not in its foremost thinkers and therefore obscurely, but
in the present century more and more signally within the
last generation — have turned into the psychological path,
English influence, not hard to trace, may always be seen
at work. They have often laughed, Germans especially,
from the height where they were labouring to fly, at our
sober march below — as if much groping along nether ways
44 THE ENGLISH MIND.
could call itself philosophy ! they have sometimes (it is
worth our looking to see whether not now), getting upon the
path by our side, truly strode forward while we were creep-
ing. But at all events our march has not been broken ; and
the path we may call ours.
Once more, ours is a moralising philosophy. Not that the
representative thinkers are moralisers by profession — for
that is the business of weaker philosophers or other men ;
they are not even all moralists, which is something very
different : and yet the phrase is fitly applied, if by moralising
is meant the habit of turning all things to the account of
human conduct. The charge has been laid against our
whole literature that a vein of sermonising runs every-
where through it, the highest artistic effect being constantly
missed that some practical lesson or other may be enforced.
And certainly our philosophy or truth-seeking, while it
has recommended and fostered the science which makes
man master of the powers of nature to wield them for his
ends, has also in its more immediate sphere been for-
ward to draw from the limits of human knowledge the
lesson that in good practice, far more than in vain search
after the inconceivable, man best works out the possibilities
of his being.
And now, in a word, to end as we began with our pungent
but not unfriendly critic — a man whom the sombre vision
that he conjures up has not deterred from working quite
lately, with a genial power of his own, in the very track
of English psychologists, and who more than any other is
helping to restore the influence of English philosophical
thought in France. Shall we accept his view of our position
— that picture of the yawning abysses with tremulous
mortals peering over the verge into darkness, and for
want of sight, putting wild or gloomy fancies there as they
draw back to sate eye and heart with the things of sense ?
We need not accept the picture, though we may have come
to be able to conceive how it should have been painted.
Its main lines are an attempt to portray a mental attitude
which we have found some historical reasons for ascribing to
the thinkers of our name. But the action gives a suggestion
of helpless despair, and the colouring has a tone of gloom,
THE ENGLISH MIND. 45
that are imagined. Men of another name, it is adroitly
hinted, are in a brighter case, have far glances into a region
of light and see the things that are near with other eyes.
It is hinted, but it is far from being made out. And if
that is not made out, still less is justice done to the per-
tinacious ardour with which, as we have now seen, English
thinkers have through ten centuries again and again essayed
to face the mystery of the universe, or to the true philosophic
wisdom with which, bowing the head at every repulse before
the impregnable, they have turned to search out with a
sterner determination the untold secrets of nature to which
they held the key, and to do better what their right hand
found to do. That, as it seems to me, is the characteristic
note of English philosophy.
THE SENSES.1
SUPPOSE, by a wild stretch of imagination, some mechanism
that will make a rod turn round one of its ends, quite slowly
at first, but then faster and faster, till it will revolve any
number of times in a second ; which is, of course, perfectly
imaginable, though you could not find such a rod or put
together such a mechanism. Let the whirling go on in a
dark room, and suppose a man there knowing nothing of
the rod : how will he be affected by it ? So long as it turns
but a few times in the second, he will not be affected at all
unless he is near enough to receive a blow on the skin. But
as soon as it begins to spin from sixteen to twenty times a
second, a deep growling note will break in upon him through
his ear ; and as the rate then grows swifter, the tone will go
on becoming less and less grave, and soon more and more
acute, till it will reach a pitch of shrillness hardly to be
borne when the speed has to be counted by tens of thou-
sands. At length, about the stage of forty thousand revolu-
tions a second, more or less, the shrillness will pass into
stillness ; silence will again reign as at the first, nor any
more be broken. The rod might now plunge on in mad
fury for a very long time without making any difference to
the man ; but let it suddenly come to whirl some million
times a second, and then through intervening space faint
rays of heat will begin to steal towards him, setting up a
feeling of warmth in his skin ; which again will grow more
and more intense, as now through tens and hundreds and
thousands of millions the rate of revolution is supposed to
rise. Why not billions ? The heat at first will be only so
much the greater. But, lo ! about the stage of four hundred
billions there is more — a dim red light becomes visible in
1 A Lecture delivered in the Hulme Town Hall, Manchester, on
Wednesday, 3rd December, 1873.
THE SENSES. 47
the gloom; and now, while the rate still mounts up, the
heat in its turn dies away, till it vanishes as the sound
vanished; but the red light will have passed for the eye
into a yellow, a green, a blue, and, last of all, a violet. And
to the violet, the revolutions being now about eight hundred
billions a second, there will succeed darkness — night, as
in the beginning. This darkness too, like the stillness,
will never more be broken. Let the rod whirl on as it
may, its doings cannot come within the ken of that man's
senses.
This experimental fancy — rather apt to take the breath
away — I quote from the German books where it is to be
found, because it brings into line, in a striking way, the
most of what physical science can tell us about the senses,
and at the same time suggests a number of questions, which,
though they go beyond physics to answer, are among those
that we must try to deal with this evening. Physics, as
you know, is the science treating of nature, or the world of
matter ; and it explains what it can of the changes or pro-
cesses going on there by resolving them into motions, under
some general laws that have been very certainly determined.
Now a great part of all the changes in nature are in the
sensible qualities of things, such as their colour, temperature,
and the like ; and for all the variety of these the physical
inquirer seeks out an expression in terms of motion. That
in the objects sound, colour, &c., are motions, however they
may appear to particular senses, was long ago surmised ; as,
indeed, in the case of sound, which first began to be under-
stood, the fact is often quite evident. Sonorous bodies like
a bell or a drum or a musical string are plainly in motion,
which may pass to other bodies, and in particular by one
great body, the air, can be carried a long way. The motion
in bodies when giving forth light or heat, and the medium —
not air — which is the general bearer of that motion, have
been much less easy to determine ; but modern inquiry has
practically mastered the difficulty, and the tremendous
figures given in our fancied experiment are some of those
assigned in all soberness for the number of vibrations per
second in the all-pervading ether that go with simple sensa-
tions of heat and colour in us. There is no expression of
48 THE SENSES.
the same definite kind for tastes and smells ; the process-
there being of the chemical rather than of the mechanical
sort. But a chemical action also is, in the last resort,,
intelligible to us only as a mode of motion ; and thus we
may say that all sensible qualities are resolved by physical
science into motions in the objects. In touch, which has-
not been mentioned, the action is mechanical of the most
apparent kind.
Now, coming back to our rod, whose whirling is supposed
to communicate to the air and ether in the room motions,
of like rate to those caused in fact by sounding, hot and
shining bodies, we may remark two things strange. The
first is that its motion had no effect on the man except
at particular stages, and within a definite range at each.
Putting always aside the case of actual contact as practically
out of the question, we note the blank before the first deep
groan burst forth, the tremendous blank when the last,
screech had gone out until heat began to steal in, and again
the immeasurable tract lying beyond the limit where light
passed into darkness. The second fact is, that within a
certain range the motion appeared differently as both heat
and light. Why should one rate of the motion appear only
as sound, another only as heat, and another only as light ?
Why should other rates among or outside of these not
appear as anything at all? And why should one rate appear
doubly as both heat and light ? These are questions that
do not concern the physical inquirer, whose work is done
when he has got the sensible qualities into expressions
admitting of definite measurement. But we must try to
find an answer for them.
There can be no doubt in what direction we have first to
look. The question is why bodies outside of us affect us in
certain ways and not in others. Well, of course, that
depends on our capacity of being affected. Our physical
frame or body offers itself to be acted on by other bodies in
motion, and the result in the first instance must depend
upon what organs and what kind of organs it has for receiv-
ing the motion or stimulus. This it is the business of a
different man of science, the physiologist, to determine ;
and within the last generation or two — not earlier — a great
THE SENSES. 49
deal has been done for the physiology of sensation, however
much remains to be learned.
In regular sensation, as of a colour or sound, there is an
invisible disturbance in some part or parts of the mass of
the brain within the skull. This disturbance results from
an ingoing wave or current of invisible motion along the
white fibrous lines called nerves. This wave or current
begins at the outer ends of the nerve-fibres, where they are
in conjunction with various microscopic structures, partly
nervous, partly other than nervous ; and these structures
are reached by the exciting stimulus (which we have seen
to be some motion, visible or invisible, in external bodies),
through the parts or openings on the surface of the human
body — eyes, ears, and the like — which are commonly called
the organs of the senses. It is a very complex process alto-
gether, and for true sensation all the stages are of account ;
yet some are easily seen to be of greater importance than
others. Least important is the part played by the external
organs, for these are often injured without sensation being
stopped. Most important is the action of the brain, without
which there can be no conscious state at all. For the rest,
let us carefully distinguish between the nerve-fibres going
to the brain and their endings in the minute structures.
Nerve-fibres, by themselves, are mere conductors which,
like telegraph-wires, may carry indifferently in either direc-
tion, and, though in the actual nerves, which are compound
bundles of fibres, they carry only one way, they will carry
any sort of disturbance, whatever it be, that is strong enough
to rouse them at all. Thus the optic nerve may be excited
by any strong pressure, and is not excited when acted on
directly by the proper stimulus of light, which happens to
be a very weak one. In short, the fibrous lines of nerve
seem not to determine the character of the sensations had
through them, any more than a telegraph-wire determines
the import of the message sent along it. But, if the mere
nerves are practically alike in structure and function, most
varied is the structure of their endings at the outer organs.
The endings in ear, and eye, and skin are quite different ;
and, again, at different parts of the same organ — as between
the middle and sides of the back of the eye, or between the
4
50 THE SENSES.
finger-tips and skin of the shoulders in the organ of touch
— the variety of structure is very great. Note this second
point, because we shall come back upon it later. It is the
first point that concerns us now.
Besides the fibres, it should be observed that the nervous
system includes another sort of matter, consisting of darker-
coloured cells, extremely minute in size. These cells,
wherever found — in little gatherings here and there, or
compacted into a column at the heart of the spinal cord, or
massed variously at the base of the brain, or packed away
in the winding folds next to the skull-cap — are storehouses
of pent-up energy, ready, upon the least excitement, to
burst forth as invisible motion along fibrous lines laid from
them. The fibres are in substance much less unstable, and
besides, both singly and as done up in bundles, or again in
the sets of bundles which are called nerves, are protected
by sheaths along their whole length, the ends only being
left exposed. Now, as the brain buried away in the skull
is, in the regular process of sensation, thrown into action
only by the disturbance sent up along the nerve-fibres from
their tiny ends thus unprotected, the stimulus applied here
must either be very strong in itself, or, if weak, must some-
how be strengthened to produce an effect. And strong
enough it sometimes is, as from a violent blow or burn on
the skin, destroying the very tissue of the nerves where
they end, and thence, by way of the spinal cord and brain,
throwing the whole frame into convulsive spasms. More
commonly however the natural stimulus, as we had already
occasion to remark of light, is very weak. What strength,
do you suppose, is there in those inconceivably minute
ether-waves that reach us after travelling years and years
through space from a glimmering star of the sixth magni-
tude ? Or what violence is there in the air-waves bringing
tidings that a pin has fallen on the floor ? Unless there is
some means of intensifying or multiplying the stimulus, it
will tap in vain even where the sluggish fibres present open
ends to it. Now, practically, there are such means. Specks
of the grey unstable matter are found at many places joined
with the fibre-ends, able to catch a stimulus too faint to be of
any avail against the lazy indifference of these. It is as if
THE SENSES. 51
an anxious inmate of a house, eager to learn news of some
event, but unable to stir abroad, and distrustful of the porter
at the door, should keep on the watch outside a small boy
of his own flesh and blood, eager like himself, who should
arouse the sleepy doorkeeper on every the least occasion.
Other structures also are found in the eye, that seem to
make the signal more marked by first changing its character.
In the ear there are various devices increasing the effect on
the nerve-filaments. Under the skin, wherever touch is
delicate, hard little bodies are disposed, doing regularly for
the fibre-ends what happens when a thorn finds its way
there. To give you any idea of the delicacy and variety
of the arrangements is here impossible, not to say that
much still remains to be learnt ; but there is this broad
fact to be taken along with us — that the regular stimu-
lation from natural agents, often a most gentle motion,
is taken up at all by our nerves only when it has first
been variously modified at the points where these stand
exposed.
Let us now recall the questions forced upon us by the
rod-experiment. First, there was that strange fact of breaks
or blanks in sensation, with perfect continuity of physical
stimulation. May we not say now that a great deal of
stimulation can easily be lost upon us for want of proper
means to take it up by the nerves? It is a question, at
least at the first stage, of mere physical correspondence.
You strike a string in one piano, and a string in another
close by begins also to vibrate, while other strings remain
quite still. So the nervous system, through the nerve-
endings, responds with action of its own to some rates or
kinds of physical motion, and does not respond to ether-
vibrations above those of violet and below those of heat, or
air- vibrations outside a certain range ; because the eye, and
the skin, and the ear, in those essential parts of them
through which the nerve-fibres are affected, are constituted
not otherwise than they are. Thus also may we account
for the different sensibility of different people. Some hear
sounds at both ends of the scale that average ears never take
in ; and others, with ears of less than ordinary compass,
never hear a bat squeak or a cricket chirp. The like is true
52 THE SENSES.
of vision, and the common fact of colour-blindness, blotting
out for so many people some colours entirely, is now as-
cribed to tbe absence of certain of the minute elements in
the retina or sensitive curtain at the back of the eye. And
what is total deafness or blindness? This may be due to
defect in the central organ of the brain, but also, though
centres are intact and the nervous communication is perfect,
let the truly sensitive parts in ear or eye be only a little
changed, and then, while air or ether may surge and
eddy as before, the clefts that were in consciousness will
have become chasms, engulfing the sensible glory of the
world.
The other question was how the same physical stimulus
could at the same time be the occasion of sensations so differ-
ent as heat and light. Well, but what a difference of organ
there is at the skin and in the eye ! If there is any meaning
at all in speaking of bodily conditions for mental states, it is
impossible not to connect with the difference of the minute
structures under the skin and at the back of the eye both
the fact that at the extremes of the whole sensible range
ether- waves are caught up by one line which are not caught
up by the other, and also the fact that within a certain
mean range the same waves are caught up differently
towards a different conscious result. See what takes place
in another organ — the tongue. Through the tongue, at its
tip, we not only taste, but also have a finer sense of touch
than even in the fingers, and the curious thing is that the
double duty is there done by a single nerve — not different
nerves, as for heat and light. How can the same nerve,
say from the same lump of sugar, take on impressions so
different as sweetness and roughness ? Perhaps the micro-
scope tells when it tracks part of the fine nerve-filaments
to little structures known from the analogy of the tactile
organs elsewhere to be serviceable for touch, and part into
little cup-shaped openings, which are most probably the
nerve-endings for taste, since we know that in order to be
tasted substances must first be brought to the state of liquid
solution. After that the case of heat and light, where the
organs are so very unlike, cannot at least be thought
strange. The skin within itself presents still another in-
THE SENSES. 53
stance of double sensibility, contact and temperature, which
some would make treble by adding (in my opinion errone-
ously) a sense of pain. Whether it is here enough to
suppose the nerve-endings the same and only the mode of
stimulation, as it in fact is, different ; or whether there
must be supposed peculiar nerve-endings for each sensi-
bility, are questions to be decided by positive evidence
when it can be got.
It may now occur to some of you as not so difficult, from
this point of view, to conceive of a great increase in our
sensible experience, by merely supposing us to have other
organs, or the present organs slightly varied, for catching
up the stimulation that plainly is lost upon us. Why
should our senses be limited to five, or some such number?
Voltaire, in one of his tales, has a humorous fancy of
people in Saturn with seventy-two senses, visited by a
wanderer from the region of the Dog-star with the decent
outfit of a thousand. Why not ? Under our own eyes do
we not see the lower animals often acting in a way that
means, if not quite other senses than ours, at least senses
of quite another range? But we must not stray into ques-
tions of that sort, when there are others pressing more to
be answered. For, now that we have taken from physiology
a rough notion of what happens in the human body, as
before we took from physics a rough notion of what happens
in external bodies, when there is sensation, we are still
rather at the beginning than the end of our inquiry. Colour,
for instance, which appears to be in bodies but is not there
except as a dance of particles, which is had only through
the eye and brain but is not there except as a current and
explosion — is what in itself? And if not in the thing called
coloured except in appearance, why does it so appear?
Neither physics nor physiology can tell, but only, if at all,
the science of mind, which is called psychology. I say
"if at all,-" because even the psychologist will tell us what
sensation is not, rather than what it is. This, however,
is not surprising, for neither does the science of physics
tell what motion is, but only takes it as a fact and discovers
its laws. If this is all that can be done for something so
evident as motion, much more may we expect it of a mental
54 THE SENSES.
process like sensation, that cannot in the same way be made
evident. The psychologist can search out and classify the
kinds of sensations, can show many of them to be much
less simple than they at first appear, and can discover the
laws according to which they combine to ever new results.
It is before the fact of sensation itself that his science, like
all others, breaks down. There is nothing simpler to ex-
press it by. It is sometimes said that sensations are signs
in consciousness of events that are constantly occurring in
the material world ; but though this saying has a good
meaning and is true, it makes nothing plainer. The diffi-
culty turns up again in the word consciousness. In fact,
we are here face to face with the great mystery of our being,
and must bow the head. The psychologist tries rather to
comprehend how sensations, with other elements of con-
scious experience, conspire towards the inexpressibly varied
result of our full mental life. Now sensations enter chiefly
into our apprehension of the vast material universe stretch-
ing away on all sides from us, and the main question as
regards them is how that can be.
Let us take the question in the simpler form that occurred
to us before. Colours and the like, which are not in things
nor in the brain, but in the mind or consciousness, appear
to us all to be in the things. Why? It is no sufficient answer
to say that as there is nothing but sensations in the mind
— no direct apprehension of motions in the objects or organs
— the mind can put into objects nothing else. Why is any-
thing put outside at all ? I cannot hope to give anything
like a full answer to the question even in the simplest form;
but some things may be said that have an important bearing
on it, and that should in any case be stated in giving an
account of the senses.
First of all observe that by no means all sensations are
put outside of us into things. Besides the sensations of the
five senses we have a great many other simple feelings,
often called bodily feelings, and best spoken of under the
general name of Organic Sensations, because they are con-
nected with the action, healthy or diseased, of the vital
organs. Of these none are referred to external objects in
the way that colours or sounds are, and only some of them,
THE SENSES. 55
like suffocation and hunger, are referred to particular seats
in the body. Even in the five senses many states are hardly
referred beyond the organs through which they arise. Tastes
seem to us in the tongue ; smells, often in the nostrils ;
sounds, not seldom in the ear. So also in touch the pain
of a cut from a knife appears to us in the skin, and in sight
the sensation of dazzling light is rather within the eye than
without. The regular sensations of sight and touch are,
however, referred outside. Colours always seem as if spread
out in space, and distinct points of light appear to stand
apart. The sensations of smoothness and hardness from the
same knife that caused the pain in the skin, seem to us no
states of ours but qualities of the blade. And less regularly
sounds also and odours appear to come as if from things.
Observe next this other series of facts. While it is
generally true of all these sensations that we are passive
under them, meaning that in certain circumstances it does
not depend upon our will whether we have them or not,
there is yet a great difference among them, when they are
present, in respect of our power to control them. We often
have sensations which 110 action can modify whatever we
do; whether we run, walk, stand, or lie, the discomfort
continues, and all we can say is that it is " somewhere inside".
Other sensations of the organic sort, less vague, and referred
to particular seats, as the lungs, or stomach, or teeth, we
do have some control over : by general pressure on the
parts, or other local applications, we may often alter their
degree. Greater, though still limited, is our control over
states referred to the organs of special sense : though we
cannot at once get rid of pains like those of a cut, or a burn,
or a bitter taste in the mouth, we can act very directly to
modify them. We can altogether get rid of the smells and
sounds that are referred to external things — if not by merely
turning the head, closing the passages with the fingers or
otherwise, then, at the worst, by getting up and moving
bodily away. Most perfect by far, however, is the control
over touches and sights. Here there is an action or motion
of the organs themselves. What so easily moved as the
eye and hand ? We can vary or discard touches and sights
at will by simply moving the organs.
56 THE SENSES.
What may we make out from the two sets of facts thus
running by the side of each other? In proportion as
sensations are beyond the control of our active move-
ments, they appear or remain with us as mere sensations.
In proportion as they appear to be qualities of things, and
cease to appear as sensations, they are subject to such
control. Till some other element of difference be assigned,
it is open to say that the absence or presence of active
movement with them makes all the difference. That is
not, however, the proper way to put it. It is a difference
in our consciousness or mental experience that has to be
accounted for, and the fact of active movement is nothing
to the purpose if we are not conscious of it. But this is
just what we are. Though I have before expressly kept it
out of view, there is, by the side of all these sensations,
another kind of simple conscious experience — the sense
of activity put forth, now commonly called the Muscular
Sense. In some respects it is like other sensation, and in
some respects very different. It is like in being a simple
experience, that is, one that cannot be brought to anything
simpler, and also in being connected physically with the
action of nerves. It is different in being the consciousness
of active exertion, not of any affection passively received,
and also on the physical side, because there is reason to
believe that it arises in or with the fact of motor impulse
being sent out from the brain by the nervous lines going to
the muscles, not, like sensation proper, in connexion with
nervous disturbance at the surface, which is passed up to
the brain. The experience is had in or with all movements
that we consciously make through our members, in every
case of bodily strain (where our movement is resisted or
impeded), in weighing things with our hands, in running
over things with the eyes. Bodies as spread out in space
and resisting penetration there, also the space we call free
between bodies, cannot be apprehended without it. To
see this, just watch the movements of a child making the
acquaintance of new objects or a new place. I do not say
more, because I do not wish to take you beyond the region
of facts on to ground that has been disputed among philo-
sophers for ages. It is too hard a question to venture on
THE SENSES. 57
here, how sensations, when blended with our conscious
experience of activity, may come to be transformed
into the guise of sensible qualities in things. But we
may look a little more closely at the two chief senses
— touch and sight — that give us a perception of things as
external.
We have already seen how touch and sight stand apart
from the other senses, and there is still more to say on that
head. However we may project outside of us the sensations
of sound, or smell, or even taste, it is always into things
already supposed tangible or visible, or both tangible and
visible. Our world may be called one of sights and touches.
An object spoken of comes before the mind first as it would
look to the eye, if seen, or to the touch, if felt. This is
true even of things that powerfully affect other senses, and
have their value accordingly ; for example, a piece of sugar,
a rose, a bell. As I uttered those words, did not a repre-
sentation of certain visible and tangible forms first rise
before you, one bearing sweetness, another fragrance, and
the third sound, either in fact or as a possibility? Now,
why ? The first remark to make is that, as a fact, all
objects perceived by us do, or may, affect sight and touch,
while by no means all affect the other senses. Most objects
give forth no sound that ever is heard, no odour that ever
is smelt, nor ever fall to be tasted. Though it may be, in
the first two cases, only because our hearing and smell are
not fine enough — though it may be quite different in many
of the lower animals — the fact remains true of human
beings. Remark next that smells and sounds (we may
drop tastes as unimportant) generally, as it were, steal in
upon us, without calling for any action on our part to
become sensible of them; and, again, that there is a great
deal of active movement on our part that brings on no
smells or sounds. On the other hand, observe how, in
touching and seeing, we are in general actively moving the
hands arid eyes ; and, what is still more remarkable, that
practically we never move either the body in general, or
those most mobile parts of it, the arms and hands and the
eyes, as we constantly are doing, without experiencing a
variety of sensations of touch and sight. I say in these
58 THE SENSES.
circumstances it is impossible, if it be true that bodies in
space are apprehended through our muscular activity — it is
impossible that their other prominent qualities, besides
extension and resistance, should not be supplied by touch
and sight.
But is it the case that we do not touch or see without
moving our hands and eyes ? By touch, with my hand at
rest, I perceive this table spread out and hard ; by sight I
perceive this hall, and in it people, with eyes kept perfectly
still. True, I had to move my hand into contact with the
table, and my eyelids to open them ; also, touching this
table for the first time in the dark, I certainly should move
my hand over it to know what it was, as still I must move
my eyes about to take in the hall and people properly. It
is the fact, nevertheless, that the mere outspread hand tells
of an object spread out in space, and the mere open eye
discloses a vast variety of objects.
The fact appears quite fatal to our view, and yet I venture
to assert that there is no stronger confirmation of it, the
organs of touch and vision being what they are. With
different parts of the skin we touch quite differently, and see
differently with different parts of the retina. Touch is best
at the tip of the tongue and tips of the fingers, also in the
hand generally. Sight is best within a small area known as
the yellow spot, near the middle of the back of the eye. As
the retina comes forward round the inside of the eye, it
grows less sensitive ; likewise on the skin there is a falling-
off away from the hand, greatest perhaps on the back. The
differences depend physically on the number of nerve-fila-
ments going to the parts, and on the kind of nerve-endings
found there, both (as we remarked before of the latter) vary-
ing greatly ; but let that pass. In our mental experience
the differences appear as some variety of quality or kind
in the sensations. Thus an object bright-red, when held
straight before the eye fixed, loses in brightness and even in
colour as it is moved sideways ; still more an unfamiliar ob-
ject, first seen with the side of the eye, has a different look
when it comes to be seen through the yellow spot in the
middle. So a piece of cloth feels quite differently to the
back and to the fingers. There is another and very striking
THE SENSES. 59
way of bringing out the difference in touch. Two points of
a compass felt as double at some parts seem one at others,
and the differences as measured are most surprising. The
tip of the tongue feels them double if only they are YV mcn
apart, and the tip of the forefinger if only ^ ; but they must
be held from two or three inches apart at the back and other
places, or they will be felt as one point only. Hence the
notion has been started that the skin should be viewed as a
sort of mosaic, made up of little areas or plots of varying
size — very small and closely packed at the sensitive places,
and comparatively large elsewhere — each having its own
quality of touch, not the same as at any other. Though the
view has never yet been stated in a perfectly unexceptionable
way, the idea conveyed as to the varying quality of the
sensations is, I consider, substantially correct. Whenever
two touches are distinguished, it must be because of some
difference between them in consciousness ; and the only
difference that can be at bottom is of the kind called quality.
We distinguish tastes by their quality, smells by their
quality, sounds by their quality ; and the different quality of
musical sounds is now believed to depend on the different
nerve-fibres affected. Why not also in touch, where there
may be a difference, not of nerve-fibres only, but of nerves ?
I hold that in many cases we do actually feel the difference
of quality, and that where we do not it is because the differ-
ence comes, as we shall see, to mean something else. In
the eye there is no doubt about the fact, for there the differ-
ence of quality remains apparent.
If the difference is a fact, there must first be some means
of discounting it in practice, whenever confusion might arise
from the varying reports. The means consists in taking as a
standard the report of that part of the whole organ which is
at once most sensitive and most easily moved. For touch
this is the hand and especially the finger-tips, the more
sensitive tongue being not fit for general work ; for the eye
it is the yellow spot about the middle. The hand may truly
be called the organ of touch, to which the rest of the skin
plays a part like that of the web about a spider : let there
be a suggestion of contact anywhere, and straightway the
hand can be borne thither, to feel for itself. So in the eye :
60 THE SENSES.
no spider darts from its lair in the centre to any part of its
web more deftly than the yellow spot turns round, with the
swift and easy motion of the eyeball, to catch for itself the
images thrown on other parts of the retina. The yellow
spot can with like reason be called the organ of sight.
Nothing is easier than the movement in either case, and
accordingly it is often made when we fancy both hand and
eye at rest ; nay, it is very difficult, in touching or looking,
not to make some movement of the organs. We come, how-
ever, not to need to make an actual movement in order to
correct roughly the report of any outlying part. Because the
differences in the quality of sensation all over the skin and
eye are constant at each part, we learn by long experience
to judge well enough for many practical purposes what
the standard report would be without moving to get it.
We still move hand and eye when we want to be quite
sure.
Mark now what further happens in touch. The dis-
crepancies, though got over as elements of confusion by
translation into touch of the hand, remain at the different
places constant marks of the respective movements necessary
to bring the hand thither. Indirectly, also, two different
touches will come to suggest the movement of hand neces-
sary to pass from the one place to the other. That is to
say, .upon the theory of perception which I am here
assuming, each kind of touch comes to be localised directly
with reference to touch of the hand, and all indirectly come
to be localised with reference to each other. The skin is
thus again mapped out, and now in the true sense of a map,
with every touch in a certain relative position. And so
predominant does this new character become in conscious-
ness, that, when now we have touches, we are apt to think
of them first as lying apart in their places on the surface of
the body, not as they may differ in quality among themselves.
The change of character will not seem so wonderful, if we
think how in the first months of our lives we were doing
little else but feeling about over our bodies with the hands.
Its own skin is the first surface that a child comes to know
of as spread out in space, and, being itself everywhere
sensitive, the skin becomes the direct measure of all surfaces
THE SENSES. 61
in contact with it. Accordingly, when it is affected at
different points, or over a certain extent, we at once perceive
a number of objects, or one continuous object, spread out in
a manner corresponding. For a rough and general appre-
hension of that sort there need be no actual movement now ;
but how much was there not in the past for that to have
become possible !
So much for touch. The same does not happen in the
eye, because sight itself has to be brought into relation with
touch. Sight appears, indeed, to have nothing to do with
touch when it opens up far horizons over the face of earth,
and even brings within ken the great vault of heaven ; but
that is not the work of the eye alone. The ever-changing
image on the back of the eye, though it imitates upside
down, as far as a tiny flat picture can, all the variety of the
great world, gives but a varied suggestion of the experiences
to be had from moving up to objects and feeling them — an
exact suggestion of objects in a room or on the earth which
we can so touch, but a very crude and false suggestion,
however beautiful a one, of the star-sown depths of space so
utterly beyond our reach. For all its range and delicacy,
the eye is but as a servant bringing spoil within the hand's
rough grasp ; and only has this compensation, that the
mind, so to speak, the master of both, sets the acquisition
after all to the servant's account. Wherefore, we speak of
simply seeing objects, and we do, in fact, spread over their
full dimensions, as apprehended by the moving hand, or
imagined upon a corresponding scale, the colour which is
the note of the eye's service. Now, because the eye, in
spite of this recognition of its work, does not determine
what we call the real size, shape, distance, and other such
attributes of objects, but only supplies varied marks thereof,
we are not to expect that the differences of quality in the
sensibility of the retina should among themselves appear in
such a new character as that acquired by those of touch.
Without ceasing to be mere differences in kind of light and
colour, they can each in that character become suggestive
signs of such general movements of body as will bring about
active contact with the objects. And thus with my eyes
simply open and fixed, the mere gradations of optical effect,
62 THE SENSES.
as determined by the structure of the retina, suffice to
suggest to me such general apprehension of a hall with
people in it as I thus get. It becomes a more distinct
apprehension when I throw my eyes about and bring part
after part of the retinal picture on the spot of clearest
vision ; but even so, what the eye does is still only to
give a suggestion, though a better-marked one, of the ex-
periences I should have in detail, if I were to walk about
in the hall and feel over successively the various objects it
contains.
I have thus tried to bring before you some aspects of a
very great subject. How can there be a greater than the
Senses, when here we have nothing less than the two worlds
of matter and mind brought manifestly together ? Though
the subject could only be touched on the surface here and
there, I may have given you matter for a good deal of
thought. And if there were any need to draw a moral, it
might be this, that as the firmest apprehensions and con-
victions, like those we have just been considering, may
emerge from the slow growth of daily experience, we cannot
be too careful, where we have things in our power, what we
suffer our daily experience to be.
HOW WE COME BY OUE KNOWLEDGE.1
THE old question of the relation of Knowledge and Ex-
perience is generally thought to have passed into a new
phase in recent years. Nobody now-a-days seriously main-
tains the sensationalist position of the eighteenth century.
Even those who attach most value to Locke's way of
thinking are ready to scout the notion of tabula rasa, and
to allow that the old supporters of innate ideas, native intui-
tions or whatever else they were called, had a real insight
into the nature of knowledge as manifested- by every human
mind. There is an element or factor in the individual's
knowledge that is there before or, at all events, apart from
that which happens to come to him by way of ordinary
experience.
This other element or factor is now most commonly
represented as an inheritance that each human being brings
into life with him. The inheritance can perhaps be most
definitely conceived in terms of the nervous organisation
which, it is practically certain, is involved in all mental
goings-on, but it must admit of expression in terms of
consciousness also. We are to understand that a human
child, being what he is — the offspring of particular parents,
of a particular nation, of a particular race, born at a
particular stage in the race's development — does know and
feel and will otherwise than he would if all or any of these
circumstances were different. Nor does this apply only to
the general laws and limits of his knowing, feeling and
willing : it must apply also to his simplest conscious
experience of any sort. An artist's sense of colour or sound
will be something different from a costermonger's, and not
merely because of a difference in the experience they have
had and stored up. Their sensible experience will have been
1 Reprinted, by permission, from the Nineteenth Century, March, 1877.
64 HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.
of intrinsically different quality from the beginning; and the
principle of heredity must contain the explanation of such
differences, if it does explain the general uniformities to
which intelligence appears to be subject in all minds alike.
Confining attention, however, on the present occasion,
with philosophers in general, to the uniformities of know-
ledge— such, for example, as the reference we all make of
sensible qualities to a substance or underlying thing in
which they inhere, or the conviction we have that every
event has been caused — I cannot for my own part doubt
that human beings are determined by inherited constitutions
(mental or nervous, or mental and nervous) to interpret and
order their incidental experience in a certain common
fashion. In the absence of a definite mental constitution,
which must be inherited because the corresponding nervous
organism is inherited, there is, I think, no way of conceiving
how human beings come by the knowledge that we seem all
to have in normal circumstances ; as, accordingly, when the
inheritance is plainly abnormal — for instance, in idiots — the
mode or amount of knowledge is clearly different from what
it is in other men. At the same time it does not seem
possible upon this line to get beyond a general conviction
that the way of men's knowing is prescribed for them by
ancestral conditions. Or, if the attempt is made to determine
the details of our intellectual heritage, it seems impossible
to stop and not fall into the notion that original endowment
is everything, and a man's life-experience little or nothing,
towards the sum of his knowledge. The latest phase of
modern philosophic thought, then, becomes hardly distin-
guishable from the high speculative doctrine of Leibniz—
that in knowledge there is, properly speaking, no acquisition
at all, but every mind (or monad) simply develops into
activity all the potency within it, not really affected by or
affecting any other mind or thing. The notion is of course
suicidal ; for how can there be, on the whole, a progressive
evolution of all, except there be action and re-action among
individuals, as the condition of working up to higher and
higher stages of being ? Nevertheless, it is no exaggeration
to say that the tendency of recent evolutionism in psychology
is to reduce to a minimum, or even crush out, the influence
HOW WE COME BY OUE KNOWLEDGE. 65
of incidental experience as a factor in the development of the
individual's knowledge. What can happen to the individual
in his little life seems to be so mere a trifle by the side of
all that has before happened for him through the ages!
Once recognise a more or less constant a, priori element
in knowledge as coming by way of inheritance, and what is
then wanted for the explanation in detail of the uniformity
that appears in the knowledge of different men is an ade-
quate conception of the actual life-experience. of individuals.
It is truly surprising how meagre and artificial — artificial in
the sense of coming short of the fulness of natural fact — the
conception current among philosophers has been. Sensa-
tionalists in particular were concerned to take no narrow
view of the case. In point of fact, they so read their famous
formula about Sense and Intellect as to throw away a cause
that in itself was far from weak. The notion was that children
coming into the world had everything to do and find out
for themselves. The world was there, and the little creatures,
all naked without, and their minds like a sheet of white
paper within, were thrown down before it, at once to struggle
for bodily existence and to take on mentally what impress
they might from surrounding things. If they managed to
survive, as somehow they generally did, they were found
after a time in possession of a certain amount of knowledge
about the world and themselves ; and (most remarkable ! )
this knowledge, though it might be limited, as of course
children's knowledge must be expected to be, was yet so
definite in each and uniform in all, that it had only to be
expressed by a system of signs (which, after long doing with-
out them, men had somehow agreed to use) , and the children
were turned into sociable creatures with whom it was
possible to hold rational converse. Now it is not to be
denied that, in working out their theory, the Sensationalists
were the first to determine with some exactness the ele-
ments of sensible experience involved in many of our most
important cognitions, and also those intellectual laws of
association under which these elements are ordered or fused
(as the case may be). But it cannot be allowed that they
gave anything like an adequate analysis of knowledge
generally, or, in particular, rendered a likely account of the
5
66 HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.
way in which the swarm of jostling sensations and other
strictly subjective experiences settled down and were trans-
formed into the coherent and orderly mental representation
of boys and girls beginning to communicate with one
another and with their parents and friends. The least
consideration, indeed, might have revealed the error of the
point of view. Children are as little left to work out their
knowledge for themselves as to nurture their bodies. If they
were left to struggle alone against the world for bodily life,
they would assuredly perish. If they were left to find out
everything in the way of knowledge by themselves, they
might (always supposing their bodily life sustained for the
first year or two) come to combine sensible impressions
for the guidance of muscular acts ; but they would not
be the rational educable creatures that even mudlarks,
living the social life, are at the age of three.
' The social life ' — in these words is indicated the grand
condition of intellectual development which the older
psychologists are far more to be condemned for overlooking,
than they can be blamed for not anticipating the notion of
heredity that has grown out of the biology of the present
century. In the last century, other sciences had not
advanced far enough to make scientific biology possible ;
and psychology, in as far as it depends on true biological
notions, could not but suffer accordingly. But in the last
century, as at other times, it was sufficiently plain that
children, in being born into the world, are born into society,
and are under overpowering social influences, before (if one
may so speak) they have any chance of being their proper
selves. To say nothing of the bodily tendance they receive
—though this is really a fundamental condition of their ever
having an intellectual development — let it be considered how
determinate their experience is rendered by circumstances
or the will of those about them. For long months — such
are the conditions of human life — children are confined to
the experience of but a few objects ; and even these they
become familiar with more through the direct action of
others, carrying them about, than through initiative of their
own. Apparently a restriction, this first effect of the social
relation is, in truth, a potent factor in the development of
HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE. 67
knowledge. It supplies the best conditions for that associa-
tion and fusion of impressions on the different senses which
in some form must unquestionably be got through at the
earliest stage of intellectual growth. Being destined to
enter into a fabric of general knowledge, the discrete sense-
impressions received by children must be elaborated in quite
another way, and to quite another extent, than if, as in
animals, they were merely to be used for the guidance
of immediate action. It is no small thing for children, that
the range of their early experience is so narrowed as to
give them a chance of becoming perfectly familiar with all
the details of it.
It is not, however, till a stage after the earliest — though
still a very early one — that the effect of social conditions
upon the intellectual development of children becomes most
marked. Before they are themselves able to speak and be-
come full social factors, they begin to have the benefit of
the spoken language that holds a society together. What
can better help a child to identify as one object a complex
of impressions appearing amid ever-varying circumstances,
than hearing it always indicated by the sound of the same
name ? The first business of children, before they rise to
comprehensive knowledge, is to have a definite apprehension
of objects in space ; and to this they are helped not least
effectively by the fact that there is a current medium of
social communication about things, the advantage of which
is, strictly speaking, forced upon them. Constraint there
is, when one thinks how people are for ever obtruding names
upon the child's ear, both when they have occasion to speak
among themselves, and when they take occasion (as some
are always found ready) to lavish attention upon babies.
And though it may well be doubted whether children always
relish the outpourings of social tenderness to which they
must submit, there can be no question as to the intellectual
advantages that, even through suffering, they receive. Their
chief end, on emerging from infancy with their little stock
of knowledge, is to understand and be understood by others;
and, meanwhile, they have entered, without effort of their
own, into possession of a store of names adapted to all the
exigencies of intelligent intercourse.
68 HOW WE COME BY OUE KNOWLEDGE.
But this is only the first, and not the chief, intellectual
gain that accrues to children from the existence of ready-
made language. Whatever the occasion may have been
that first called into play the expressive faculty between
man and man, it is beyond dispute that language is required
mainly for purposes of general knowledge. The language
spoken by a race of men is an accurate index to the grade of
intellectual comprehension attained by that race, and the
intellectual progress of the race may be traced in the gradual
development of its speech. See, then, what comes to the
opening mind of the child with the use of his mother-tongue.
The words and sentences that fall upon his ear and are
soon upon his lips, express not so much his subjective
experience, as the common experience of his kind which
becomes, as it were, an objective rule or measure, to which
his shall conform. Why, for example, does a child have no
difficulty about the relation of substance and qualities that
has given philosophers so much trouble ? and why do all
children understand or seem to understand it alike, what-
ever their experience may have been? Why? but because
the language put into their mouths, and which they must
e'en use, settles the point for them, one and all ; involving,
as it does, a metaphysical theory which, whether in itself
unexceptionable or not, has been found serviceable through
all the generations of men. Or, to take that other great
uniformity or law of knowledge which has become so
prominent in philosophical speculation since the time of
Leibniz and Kant, — why do we all assume that every event
must have a 'cause? Let it be granted — though this is,
perhaps, doubtful — that all men do arid must always make
the assumption. The philosophical difficulty is how any
human mind can so far transcend its own limited experience
as to make an assertion about all possible experience in all
times and places, and it is well known how it has been met
by the opposite schools : those at one extreme declaring in
various phrase that it is the mind'snature, before all experi-
ences, so to [interpret any experience ; and those at the
other extreme making what shift they can to show how the
conviction springs up with, or is developed from, the indi-
vidual's experience. For my part, I can agree with neither.
HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE. 69
I cannot go with those who declare that no amount of experi-
ence, in any shape or form, can be the ground of such con-
viction as we do, in fact, have of universal causation. But
I can as little go with the other class of thinkers, when they
suppose that a conviction like that is left to the individual
to acquire by private experience or effort. Long before
children have the least occasion to try what they can do in
the way of generalisation upon their incidental experiences,
it is sounded in their ears that things in the world are thus
and thus ; and that child were indeed a prodigy of pure
reason who should pause and gravely determine not to take
on the yoke of social opinion till he could prove it, of him-
self, well founded. He does — he must — accept what he is
told ; and in general he is only too glad to find his own
experience in accordance with it. And if to this it be objected
that children cannot understand the generalities they hear
unless by reason of native principles in their intellectual
consciousness, the answer is, that they do not by any means
begin by understanding them. This comes only very gradu-
ally to the best of us, and to some comes hardly at all.
On the whole, then, the description I would give of our early
progress in knowledge — and the early progress is decisive of
our whole manner of knowing till the end — is something like
this : that we use our incidental, by which I mean our
natural subjective, experience mainly to decipher and
verify the ready-made scheme of knowledge that is given
to us en bloc with the words of our mother-tongue. This
scheme is the result of the thinking, less or more conscious,
and mainly practical, of all the generations of articulately
speaking men, passed on with gradual increase from each to
each. For the rest, I should be the last to deny, having
before asserted, that the part we are intellectually called to
play is predetermined for each of us by a native constitution
of mind, which, 011 one side, assimilates us in way of think-
ing to all other men of our race and time, if also, on another
side, it marks us off from all other men and . contains the
deepest ground of what is for each of us our proper self. But
I desire to express the opinion that there is no explanation
of any mind's knowledge from this position, even when account
is taken also of all the modes of natural experience noted by
70 HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.
psychologists, unless there is added, over and above, the
stupendous influence of social conditions, exercised mainly
through language. How far would his native mental con-
stitution (whether regarded as an inheritance or not), with
all his senses and all his natural activities, carry a child in
the direction of knowledge, supposing him to grow up face
to face with nature in utter loneliness ? I believe it would
need an effort which none of us can so far abstract from
the conditions of our knowledge as to be able fully to make —
to conceive how insignificant such a creature's knowledge
would be.
It should be understood that the question raised in this
short paper (written originally as a mere thesis for dis-
cussion) is a strictly psychological one. The psychologist's
concern in knowledge is to show how it is generated in the
mind. For this, he must carefully analyse knowledge, as it
appears in himself and others, so as to have insight into the
matter he would explain, and his work is done when he then
shows how knowledge arises in each of us naturally. It is
another and very different question — what knowledge is to
be held as objectively true or valid for all minds alike.
When is my knowledge such that I may claim your assent
to it? To answer this question, or, in other words, to
determine the conditions of scientific knowledge, belongs to
philosophy in general or logic in particular, and remains an
imperative task after any amount of psychological inquiry.
But the psychological question, within its own limits, is a
very real one, and it is indeed the natural, if not the
necessary, preliminary to the other.
Even as psychological, however, the question is here in
various ways narrowed. It is a question referring only to
knowledge, to the exclusion of feeling and willing, and to
knowledge only as it appears (naturally) with a character of
uniformity among different men. The social influence
insisted upon does nothing to explain the intellectual
idiosyncrasies of each individual : these, if explicable at all
in their variety, must be traced to special inheritance (as
suggested above) or incidental experience. On the other
hand, it is plain that the influence extends beyond intelli-
HOW WE COME BY OUB KNOWLEDGE. 71
gence proper to the other great mental phases of feeling
and willing. The tendency of men to feel and act alike is
indeed even more apparent than to think alike, and assuredly
has its explanation not least from the social tie which, from
the first, is as a spell upon the individual ; though here
again, it may be remarked, there is an ulterior question —
whether the feelings and acts naturally excited in men, from
association with their fellows, are justifiable in the sight of
philosophic reason. The effect of the social relation on the
mental development of the individual is, I repeat, a purely
natural factor for the psychologist to reckon with ; or, at
least, it is so in the first instance, however it may afterwards
seem, on evolutionist principles, to carry its justification
with it. Yet it has by psychologists generally been quite
ignored.
The same century that has seen the development of the
' historical sense ' has first begun to comprehend the relation
of perfect solidarity subsisting between the individual and
society, and for a very good reason. It is, in fact, but one
conception differently applied — when the varied life or
history of a nation is viewed as growing out of its past,
and when the mental life-history of individuals is seen to
be determined by the social conditions and traditions into
the midst of which they are born. Nor is the doctrine of
general organic evolution itself, the latest outcome of
thought in the century, aught but a more extended and
intenser reading of the same conception. So far as con-
cerns the social relation in particular, it may truly be said
that to no one thinker or school of thinkers belongs the
exclusive credit of having grasped its import for psycho-
logical theory. The notion of man as never separable
(except by abstraction) from the social organism has
emerged at the most different planes of thought, and been
suggested by various lines of scientific inquiry. Yet it
were almost an injustice not to recognise the peculiar
impressiveness with which it was proclaimed by Comte,
considering where he stands between those who went before
him and those who have come after. If he had much to
learn in the matter of psychological analysis from the ' ideo-
logists ' whom his soul abhorred, the lesson contained in
72 HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.
his protest against their individualism has in turn been too
little or too slowly regarded. It is remarkable how much
of the celebrated English work of the present century in
philosophy or psychology has continued to be done from
the individualistic point of view. Mill's theory of know-
ledge, for example, greatly as it is in advance of Hume's
as a serious constructive effort, is yet only such a doctrine
(whether of everyday experience or of organised science) as
Hume himself might have set forth a hundred years ago,
had he been really minded, as he at first professed, to work
towards a positive theory, instead of spending his strength
in pricking the bubbles blown by dogmatic metaphysicians.
Professor Bain's psychological researches have been almost
wholly analytic, in the manner of Hartley's : of extreme
importance as such — witness, in regard to the very question
of tbe sources of knowledge, his discovery (for it was hardly
less) of the element of muscular activity in objective per-
ception— yet merely adding to the list of formal factors
involved in a complete psychological construction.1 Mr.
Spencer, it is true, has always looked beyond the individual
for an explanation of the facts of mental life, intellectual or
other, but he has concentrated his energy as a psychologist
on the elucidation of the principle of heredity. It is only in
more recent psychological works, like Mr. Lewes's, or as
yet in less systematic essays and general literature, that the
social influence of man on man is forcing its way to recogni-
tion as a factor second to none in the actual process of
mental development.
A few words may be added, before closing, on one question
that suggests itself. How does the recognition of social
influence in the development of the individual's knowledge
affect the position now commonly called Experientialism ?
It is here conceded, as a matter of fact, that no one's know-
ledge is explicable from his individual experience. Although,
of course, there is a sense in which all that a man knows
1 It should be noted, however, that in one of his most characteristic
researches— his doctrine of the growth of Volition — Professor Bain has
by no means confined himself to the analytic attitude ; and here it is
interesting to observe that he distinctly posits the social influence as a
factor in the development, when showing how volition is ' extended ' by
imitation.
HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE. 73
must have been experienced by himself, it is nevermore
true that it depends upon the individual as such, either
actively or passively, what his knowledge shall be. Doubly,
as we have seen, is he beholden to his fellows. He comes
into the world what he is, even on the most strictly personal
side, through his ancestors having been what they were
and done and borne what they did in their time. And no
sooner is he in the world but he enters upon the heritage
of social traditions in the speech and ways of his kind.
Not his to wrestle by himself with a confused and perplex-
ing experience, if haply he may attain to some rude con-
struction of a world not too unlike that of other struggling
human atoms. His task at the first is but to accommodate
his experience to well-approved working rules supplied
from without, which more than anticipate his wants ; nor
is it other to the last, unless he be one of the few in each
generation who, having assimilated existing knowledge, are
moved to enlarge the intellectual horizon — to pluck up the
stakes where they found them and plant them farther out
for others slowly to work up to. The experientialist
doctrine thus appears wholly at fault if it means (as
it has often been taken by supporters and opponents
alike to mean) that all intellection was first sensation
in the individual, or even (in a more refined form)
that general knowledge is elaborated afresh by each of us
from our own experience. Neither position can be main-
tained in psychology. And yet it is notorious that exactly
those who now urge the presence of such a priori and ab
exteriori factors in the individual's knowledge as are here
contended for, and are not the least forward to make light
of incidental experience, sot most store by the teaching of
the older experientialists, and would affiliate their doctrine
upon the work, such as it was, of Locke and Hume. For
this there is a deeper reason than is commonly assigned.
It is common to say that inherited aptitudes are, after all,
only a slower result of experience, developed in the race
instead of the individual ; and the like may be said still more
evidently of the social tradition deposited in the growing
languages of mankind. The real bond, however, between
experientialists at the present day and those of an earlier
74 HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.
time is that both declare experience to be the test or criterion
of general knowledge, let its origin for the individual be
what it may. Experientialism is, in short, a philosophical
or logical theory, not a psychological one. The fact that
the pioneers of scientific psychology in the last century were
experientialists in their philosophy is not without signi-
ficance, but the two spheres of inquiry should not therefore
be confounded. One may be Lockian in the spirit of one's
general thinking, without allowing that Locke or his im-
mediate successors read aright the facts of mental develop-
ment. It is as a philosophical theory that experientialism
goes on steadily gaining ground.
ANALOGY.1
ANALOGY is the name in logic for a mode of real or material
inference, proceeding upon the resemblance between parti-
culars : speaking generally, it is that process whereby, from
the known agreement of two or more things in certain
respects, we infer agreement in some other point known
to be present in one or more, but not known to be present
in the other or others. It was signalised already by Aris-
totle under the different name of Example (irapd^e^^a),
the word Analogy (ava\o<yld) having with him the special
sense of mathematical proportion or resemblance (equality)
of ratios. The earliest use of the name in its current logical i
sense is to be found apparently in Galen. While, in popular
language, the word has come to be vaguely used as a syno-
nym for resemblance, the logical authorities, though having
generally the same kind of inference in view, are by no means
agreed as to its exact nature and ground. It has chiefly to be
distinguished from the related process of Induction, in their
conception of which logicians are notoriously at variance.
Aristotle, distinguishing Syllogism and Induction as
passing the one from whole to part (any part), and the other
from part (all the parts) to whole, notes under each a loose
or rhetorical form — Enthymeme under Syllogism, and Para-
digm, or Example, under Induction. Thus, to give his own
instance, it is an inference by way of example— if a war to
come of Athens against Thebes is condemned because a
past war of Thebes against Phocis is known to have been
disastrous. Here the reasoning, which may be said to
pass from part to part, is resolved by Aristotle as com-
pounded of an imperfect induction and a syllogism ; the
particular case of Thebes against Phocis started from being
first inductively widened into war between neighbours
1 Keprinted, by permission, from the Encyclopedia Britannica,
76 ANALOGY.
generally, and the particular case of Athens against Thebes
arrived at being then drawn out by regular syllogism from
that major. Example, or, to speak of it by its later name,
the inference from analogy, is thus presented by Aristotle
as directly related to induction : it differs from an imperfect
induction — what is now often called real or material induc-
tion from particulars incompletely enumerated — only in
having its conclusion particular instead of general, and its
datum singular instead of plural.
Kant and his followers, while maintaining a relation
between induction and analogy, mark the difference other-
wise than Aristotle. By induction, it is said, we seek to
prove that some attribute belongs (or not) to all the mem-
bers of a class, because it belongs (or not) to many of that
class ; by analogy, that all the attributes of a thing belong
(or not) to another thing, because many of the attributes
belong (or not) to this other. In this country Sir William
Hamilton has adopted this view (Lectures on Logic, vol. ii.
pp. 165-174), though he differs from Kant in understanding
it only of the process called applied or modified induction, —
not of the pure form of reasoning from all the parts to the
whole, which, in the manner of Aristotle, he puts on a level
with pure syllogistic deduction. The relation and difference
of the two processes may be formulated in the short expres-
sions : One in many, therefore one in all (Induction) ; Many in
one, therefore all in one (Analogy). For instance, it would
be an analogical inference — to conclude that a disease corre-
sponding in many symptoms with those observed in typhus
corresponds in all, or, in other words, is typhus ; whereas it
would be an induction — to infer that a particular symptom
appearing in a number of typhus patients will appear in all.
The view of Kant and Hamilton does not reach below the
surface of the matter, if it can be maintained at all. In the
first of the examples just given the inference might well be
a good induction, all depending upon the kind of symptoms
that are made the ground of the conclusion ; on the other
hand, the second might be a case of mere analogy, not to be
called induction. Neither, again, is Aristotle's view satis-
factory, which practically makes the difference to depend
upon the mere quantity of the conclusion, worked out as
ANALOGY. 77
particular for analogy by appending to the induction in-
volved a syllogism of application. Since the universal
always carries with it the particular, and cannot be affirmed
unless the particular can, the two processes become to all
intents and purposes one and the same. If the particular
or analogical conclusion is justifiable, it is because there
was ground for a good induction (only not of the pure sort) ;
if there was no ground for a good induction, then, upon
Aristotle's resolution, there can be no ground for the parti-
cular inference either. Should it be said, indeed, that the
peculiarity of the case lies not so much in the conclusion,
as in the start being made from one particular instance,
whence the process gets its name Example, that undoubtedly
will distinguish it from anything that can seriously be called
induction ; but then what becomes of the resolution that
Aristotle makes of it ? That resolution can be upheld only
at the cost of the character of the inductive process.
The logician who has done most to elaborate the theory
of real or material induction, John Stuart Mill, has also
been able to give an interpretation of analogy, which,
without in the least severing its connexion with induction,
leaves it as a process for which a distinct name is neces-
sary. According to him, the two kinds of argument, while
homogeneous in the type of their inference, which holds
for all reasoning from experience, — namely, that things
agreeing with one another in certain respects agree also in
certain other respects, — yet differ in respect of their degree
of evidence. In both the argument is from known points
of agreement to unknown ; but, whereas in induction the
known points of agreement are supposed by due comparison
of instances to have been ascertained as the material ones
for the case in hand or conclusion in view, — in other words,
to be invariably connected by way of causation with the
inferred properties, — it is otherwise in analogy, where it
is only supposed that there is no incompatibility between
the inferred properties and the common properties, or
known points of resemblance, that are taken as the ground
of inference. Thus, if by comparison of instances it had
been ascertained, or otherwise it were known, that organic
life is dependent on the bare possession of an atmosphere
78 ANALOGY.
in planetary bodies rotating upon an axis, then it would
be an induction to infer the presence of life upon any
heavenly body, known or as yet undiscovered, in which
these conditions should be detected. With our actual
knowledge, confined to the case of the Earth, and only
enabling us to say that the absence of an atmosphere must
destroy life, the inference to such a planet as Mars, where
the conditions stated seem to be present, is but analogical ;
while to the Moon, which seems to have no atmosphere,
the inference has not even this amount of force, but there
is rather ground for inductively concluding against the
possibility of organic life. Upon this view it ceases to be
characteristic of analogy that the inference should be to a
particular case only ; for the inductive conclusion, when
the evidence is of a kind to admit of such being drawn,
may as well be particular ; and, again, it may equally well
happen that the analogical inference, where nothing stronger
can be drawn, should have universal application. Notwith-
standing, it will be found in general that, where the evi-
dence, consisting of bare similarity of attributes in two or
more particular instances, permits only of an analogical
inference being made, the extension in thought takes place
to particular cases only which have a special interest, and
the mind hesitates to commit itself to a general law or rule.
Mill, therefore, though he does not raise the point, is
practically at one with Aristotle and all others who make
example or analogy to consist in the passage from one or
more particular cases to a particular new case bearing
resemblance to the former. It is his peculiar merit to have
determined the specific conditions under which the passage
in thought, whether to a particular or a general, acquires the
authority of an effective induction.
Analogy is so much resorted to in science in default of
induction, either provisionally till induction can be made, or
as its substitute where the appropriate evidence cannot be
obtained,— it is also much relied upon in practical life for
the guidance of conduct, — that it becomes a matter of great
importance to determine its conditions. Whether in science
or in the affairs of life, the abuse of the process, or what is
technically called False Analogy, is one of the most besetting
ANALOGY. 79
snares set for the human mind. It is obvious that, as the argu-
ment from analogy proceeds upon bare resemblance, its
strength increases with the amount of similarity ; so that,
though no connexion is, or can be, inductively made out
between any of the agreeing properties and the additional
property which is the subject of inference, yet (in Mill's
words), " where the resemblance is very great, the ascer-
tained difference very small, and our knowledge of the
subject-matter very extensive, the argument from analogy
may approach in strength very near to a valid induction.
If (he continues), after much observation of B, we find that
it agrees with A in nine out of ten of its known properties,
we may conclude, with a probability of nine to one, that it
will possess any given derivative property of A " (Logic, b.
iii., c. xx., § 3). But it is equally obvious that against the
resemblances the ascertainable differences should be told off.
For bare analogy, the differences in the two (or more) cases
must as little as the resemblances be known to have any
connexion, one way or the other, with the point in question ;
both alike must only not be known to be immaterial, else
they should fall quite out of the reckoning. As regards the
differences, however, this is what can least easily be dis-
covered, or, is, by the mind in its eagerness to bring things
together, most easily overlooked ; and, accordingly, the error
of false analogy arises chiefly from neglecting so to consider
them. Thus, if the inference is to the presence of organic
life of the terrestrial type on other planetary bodies, any
agreements, even when extending to the details of chemical
constitution, are of small account in the positive sense,
compared with the negative import of such facts as absence
of atmosphere in the Moon, and excess of heat or cold in
the inmost or outermost planets. To neglect such points
will not simply make the analogy loose ; but, as the very
point in question is concerned in them, the analogy becomes
false and positively misleading. Still greater is the danger
when the things analogically brought together belong not
at all to the same natural classes, but the resemblance is
only in some internal relation of each to another thing of its
own kind; as when, for example, under the name of motives,
particular states of mind (feelings, &c.) are supposed to de-
80 ANALOGY.
termine the action of a man, as the motion of a body may
be determined by a composition of forces. In such cases
there may be nothing to prevent the drawing of a good
analogy upon a strictly limited issue ; nay, there may even
sometimes, in special circumstances, be ground for drawing
an inductive conclusion ; but generally the elements of
difference are so numerous, and their import either so hard
to appreciate, or, when appreciable, so decisive in a sense
opposite to the conclusion aimed at, that to leave them out
of sight and argue without reference to them, as the mind
is tempted to do, vitiates the whole proceeding. What is
not sufficient for analogy may, however, be good as meta-
phor, and metaphor is of no small use for expository purposes ;
while (as Mill says), though it is not an argument, it may
imply that an argument exists.
The sense just mentioned of a resemblance of relations
suggests the question how far the common argument from
analogy and mathematically determinate proportion, which
was originally called by the name, are cognate processes.
Undoubtedly the common argument, proceeding upon
resemblance in the properties of things, can be made to
assume roughly the guise of a proportion, — e.g., Earth :
Mars : : Men : Mars-dwellers, or Earth : Men = Mars : Mars-
dwellers, the fact of planetary nature, or other resembling
attributes gone upon, being regarded as common exponent.
Less easy is it to interpret a determinate proportion, with
numerical equality of ratios, as analogy in the common
sense : for here the very determinateness makes all the
difference.
The name analogy is so suggestive to English readers of
Bishop Butler's famous treatise, that a word, in conclusion,
seems called for on the nature and scope of the particular
application of the process made by him. His work is
entitled The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to
the Constitution and Course of Nature, and consists in an
attempt to convince deists that there are no difficulties
urged against revelation, or the system of natural religion,
which do not bear with equal force against the order of
nature as determined by Providence. The argument is a
perfectly fair one within the limits assigned, and Butler
ANALOGY. 81
must be allowed the credit of very well apprehending the
logical conditions involved in it. In his introduction he
understates rather than overstates the strength of his posi-
tion ; for, on the assumption that the system of nature and
the system of religion must both spring from one causal
source, his argument acquires rather an inductive character.
Accordingly, it is interesting to see how, in connexion with
his sense of analogy, he practically raises, in his Intro-
duction, the question which the general theory of inductive
logic, as now understood, has first to consider, — the question,
namely, " whence it proceeds that likeness should beget that
presumptive opinion and full conviction which the human
mind is formed to receive from it " ; though he would not
take it upon him to say " how far the extent, compass, and
force of analogical reasoning can be reduced to general heads
and rules, and the whole be formed into a system ".
ANALYSIS.1
ANALYSIS means literally, in the Greek, an unloosening
or breaking-up, understood of anything complex in which
simpler constituents or elements may thus be brought to
view. It is this general sense that must be supposed to
have been present to the mind of Aristotle when he gave the
name of Analytica to the great logical work in which he
sought to break up into its elements the complex process of
reasoning; as, accordingly, in the body of the work (Anal.
Prior., i. 32), we find him once using the verb " analyse" of
arguments, when they are to be presented in " figure," or
brought to the ultimate formal expression in which they
can best be tested or understood. Obviously any more
special sense that may be ascribed to the process of analysis
must vary with the kind of complex to be resolved. Mental
states, material substances, motions of bodies, relations of
figures, are but a few examples of the complex things or
subjects that fall to be analysed, if there is to be any scientific
comprehension of them. Nor is it only that the analysis
will be into constituents differing from each other as much
as the complex subjects differ ; for the same subject may
be analysed in different ways, and with very different
results, according to the particular aspect in which it is
considered. Hence it becomes impossible, or at least very
difficult, to describe the process in any terms fitting equally
all the variety of its applications. It is from taking stand
by some particular application, and either overlooking all
others, or trying to force them within the frame of the one,
that different writers have given such discrepant accounts of
the process — discrepant often to the extent of being mutually
exclusive. The express object of the present article will, on
the contrary, be to give an unprejudiced view of the different
1 Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed.
ANALYSIS. 83
applications of analysis in science, that one being first and
most prominently put forward which was earliest recognised
and practised, namely, mathematical analysis. The other
applications, selected for their representative character, will,
as they follow, naturally suggest the consideration how far
the difference of matter in the various sciences tends to modify
the nature of the process which is called analysis in all.
By the side of Analysis, at the different stages, we shall
at the same time treat of the related process called, after
the Greek, Synthesis, which means a putting together or
compounding. If analysis and synthesis were merely re-
lated to each other as mutually inverse processes, expository
convenience alone might be pleaded in favour of the parallel
treatment ; but the two are in practice often employed as
strictly complementary processes, in support of each other
on the same occasion ; or, in other words, the composition
in synthesis may be a direct re-composition of the principles
or elements then and there got out by analysis. As a
matter of course, therefore, the foregoing general remarks
apply also to synthesis, especially the remark as to the
modifying effect of difference in the subject-matter worked
with.
I. Mathematical Analysis and Synthesis. — In the Ele-
ments of Euclid, containing so many examples of geomet-
rical propositions variously established, there is a scholion
near the beginning of Book XIII. which distinguishes two
general methods for the treatment of particular questions,
under the names of Analysis and Synthesis. In analysis, it
is said, the thing sought is taken for granted, and con-
sequences are deduced from it which lead to some truth
recognised ; synthesis, on the other hand, starts from that
which is recognised, and deduces consequences therefrom,
till the thing sought is arrived at. With more detail, but
some wavering in his use of terms, Pappus of Alexandria
(about 380 A.D.) describes the two processes at the beginning
of Book VII. of his Mathematical Collections. He appears,
however, to regard synthesis not at all as an independent
process to be applied alternatively with analysis for the
solution of particular questions (which is the view suggested
by Euclid), but rather as a complementary process bound up
84 ANALYSIS.
with the use of analysis. These are his words: "In syn-
thesis, putting forward as done the thing arrived at as
ultimate result in the way of analysis, and disposing now
in a natural order as antecedents what were consequents in
the analysis, we put them together, and finally come at
the construction of the thing sought". The two processes
are involved together in what he calls the TOTTO<? ava\v6fj,€vo<f,
or, as we may call it, one general Method of Analysis, the use
of which for the solution of problems, he says, has to be
learned after the Elements, having been developed by Euclid
himself, Apollonius of Perga, and Aristseus the elder. In
a similar sense, Robert Simson, its modern editor, speaking
of the Euclidean book of Data, calls it " the first in order
of the books written by the ancient geometers to facilitate
and promote the method of resolution or analysis ". Beyond
Euclid, however, the invention of the method was carried
back by the tradition of antiquity to Plato. The philo-
sopher, whom we know to have been an ardent student of
geometry, and otherwise a discoverer in the science, is said
by Diogenes Laertius (III. i. 19) to have devised the method
for one Leodamas, and is further said by Proclus (Comm.
in Eucl., ed. Basil, p. 58) to have made much use of it him-
self. Though the report is a loose one, it may well be that
this method of analysis was first expressly formulated by
the theoretic genius of Plato, especially in view of a passage
(Eth. Nicom., iii. 5) in Aristotle, which has not been suf-
ficiently noticed, showing that in his time, before Euclid was
born, it was currently employed by geometricians. Aristotle,
there compares the gradually regressive process of thought,
whereby the means of effecting a practical end is discovered,
to the mathematical way of inquiry upon a diagram, re-
marking of both that the last stage in the analysis (dva\v<rei)
is the first in the production or construction (yevea-ei).
However surprising it may be thought that Aristotle in his
logical works makes so little of a process which thus must
have been familiar to him, the fact that it was familiar
carries it back at least to the time of Plato. In truth it
must have been practised earlier still, from the very be-
ginnings of scientific geometry, though it may have had to
wait some time to be formulated.
ANALYSIS. 85
Taking analysis and synthesis, thus denned, either as
distinct processes or as conjoined in one method, called
analytical, we have next to see how they were brought to
bear by the ancients in treating geometrical questions.
Propositions such as those contained in the Elements fall
into two classes with respect to the form of their enuncia-
tion, namely, theorems and problems. The distinction was
not marked by Euclid himself, nor is it in any sense radical,
for either kind of proposition may easily be transformed into
the expression of the other; but, as commonly accepted, it
amounts to this — that a theorem is given out as an assertion
to be accepted, and has to be shown true ; a problem is
given out as an act to be done, and has to be shown possible.
In the case of a theorem, Euclid accordingly, after enunciat-
ing the proposition, proceeds generally to show, with more
or less construction on a particular diagram, and working
always with fixed definitions, that the assertion follows
deductively from certain truths: either assumed as evident
(axioms), or formerly proved therefrom, and seen to be
applicable to the present case by inspection of the figure as
constructed. The grounding propositions are allowed by
the reader as they are brought forward, though he may for
the moment have not the least idea whither the author is
tending, and at the end the conclusion is accepted, because
the successive premisses, being allowed, have been combined
logically. In the case of a problem, after an express con-
struction for which no reason is given, the object is to show
that what has been brought to pass really supplies what
was sought ; but the procedure is not different from what
it was in the case of a theorem, because the object is attained
by showing again that certain truths allowed, in their par-
ticular application to the figure constructed, involve as a
conclusion some relation which the figure is seen to exhibit.
Now if this is Euclid's procedure in general — there is an
exception, afterwards to be noted, where he proves his
point indirectly — it is undeniably synthetic, in any meaning
that can be ascribed to that term, the result being obtained
by a massing or combining of elements or conditions.
But on Euclid's part the process is one of demonstration,
not of discoverv. Still less is the reader's mind in the
86 ANALYSIS.
attitude of discovery : he is led on to a result which is indeed
indicated, but by a way which he does not know, and, as it
were, blindfold. There must, however, have been discovery
before there could be such demonstration ; or how should
the proposition admit of definite enunciation at the
beginning? Thus there is, in the background, an earlier
question of procedure or method, and it is this that the
ancient geometricians had chiefly in view when speaking of
analysis and synthesis.
Now, some propositions are so simple that they must
have been seen into almost as soon as conceived, and con-
ceived as soon as the human mind began to be directed to
the consideration of forms and figures ; in which case no
method of discovery, to speak of, can have been necessary.
There is, again, another class of propositions, more complex
though still simple, which probably were established by a
process of straightforward synthesis. An inquirer must
have in his head some knowledge in the shape of principles
more or less fixed, or he would not be an inquirer ; and
either the accidental combination of such principles may
lead in his mind to particular results, or the first time a
particular question suggests itself to him, it may be seen at
once to involve, or to follow from, certain of the principles.
Many propositions in the Elements, giving the most ap-
parent properties of triangles, circles, &c., it can hardly be
doubted, were arrived at by this way of discovery, even
when a more elaborate process of synthesis was employed
for their formal demonstration ; as, for example, in the case
of the famous fifth proposition of Book I. But the same
process of direct composition (understood always as joined
with inspection) is no longer applicable, or is not effective,
when the question is of less obvious properties, or of
construction to be made under special conditions. To
discover the fact or the feasibility in such cases is so much
the real difficulty, that the question of demonstration be-
comes of merely secondary importance. And there is even
a still prior question of discovery ; for it has to be determined
that some points rather than others should be made the
subject of express inquiry. This, however, may be left
aside. To any one engaged in geometrical inquiry, in the
ANALYSIS. 87
constant inspection of figures for the understanding of their
properties and mutual relations, questions must incessantly
be occurring — so incessantly and inevitably that it is need-
less, if it were not vain, to seek out a reason for the
particular suggestions. As in all discovery to the last, so
more especially at the first stages, there is an element
of instinctive tact in the mind's action which eludes expres-
sion ; and there is also an element of what might be called
chance, were it not that those only get the benefit of it
who are consciously on the look-out, either generally
or in some special direction. A particular question
being started by whatsoever suggestion, how shall the
mind arrive at certain knowledge regarding it ? Such,
practically, is the form which is assumed by geometrical
inquiry.
Besides the thing sought there is nothing else given, or at
least there is nothing else immediately given or suggested.
But the mind is supposed to have some knowledge pertaining
to the matter — though not extending to the particular aspect
of it — in question, also some knowledge of such matters
generally. In such circumstances the aim of the inquirer
must be to bring what is sought into some definite relation
with what is known. Direct composition or synthesis of
the known, with more or less of construction, if it led to that
which is sought as a result, would determine the relation for
the inquirer, and determine it in like manner for all who
allow the principles whence the conclusion is logically de-
duced, being thus at one stroke both discovery and demon-
stration. But synthesis, arbitrarily made, as it must be
where the question is at all difficult, may fail, however often
it is attempted. Without a proper start it avails nothing ;
and what is to determine the start ? There is always one
course open. Let the objective itself be made the starting-
point, and let it be seen whether thence it may not be
possible by some continuous route to get upon known
ground. In other words, a thing sought, when itself
assumed, may admit of being brought into relation, upon
some side or other, with the body of ascertained knowledge.
If it can be so brought, through whatever number of steps,
there is then attained as a result what before it was impos-
88 ANALYSIS.
sible to light upon as a beginning ; and now nothing hinders
from making the start originally desired, and from reaching
as a proper conclusion the assumed beginning, if the path
struck out before is measured over again in the opposite
direction. The course thus becomes once more synthetic,
but only because of what was first accomplished. Till the
point in question was made to yield up its own secret by a
process fitly called analysis or resolution, nothing certain
could be determined. At the analytic stage, however, the
line taken may be twofold. The proposition, assumed at
starting as something definite to work from, either may be
held as following deductively from some other, which again
is dependent on still another or others, till one is worked up
to that is known to be true ; or it may be taken as itself a
premiss leading deductively to some other proposition, which
in turn, by one or more steps, leads to a true proposition as
conclusion. In either case the implication is that a proposi-
tion must itself be true, if by any line of formally correct
logic it leads to a proposition known to be true. And
though the expression must be modified for questions in the
form of problems, requiring something to be done — to which
form of question, indeed, the analytic process is peculiarly
applicable — the point of logical principle remains there
exactly the same.
But is the process, thus stated as it was understood by
the ancient geometricians, logically valid? In the first of
the two alternative forms, it is valid : the proposition
assumed at starting will undoubtedly be true, if a proposi-
tion on which it is shown to be ultimately dependent is
true. At the same time, there is in this case no guarantee
that the most effective line for establishing it has been taken,
in view of the well-known logical principle that the same
conclusion may follow from different premisses. In the other
form of the process, where the proposition assumed is itself
used as a premiss, the case as to validity is otherwise. As
Aristotle first clearly apprehended and showed, it is quite
possible to reach a (materially) true conclusion by strict
logical deduction from premisses either one or both false ;
and thus the mere fact that the proposition assumed is
found, in combination with others, to lead to a conclusion
ANALYSIS. 89
known to be true, does nothing to establish its own char- i
acter. Yet although the process of analysis thus carried
out by way of deduction, as formulated by Euclid and (in
one of his expressions) by Pappus, is theoretically faulty,
through neglect or ignorance of Aristotle's observation, the
practice of Euclid is not therefore invalidated. It was his
habit, as Pappus also enjoins, to follow up the analysis by
a synthesis consisting in a reversal of it, and this would
effectively get rid of error ; since the result of the analysis,
if it did not follow from the assumed premiss by true im-
plication, but only accidentally, could not itself, when in
turn used as a premiss for the synthesis, be made to yield
the original proposition as a legitimate conclusion. In
order, however, to validate this form of analysis it is not
necessary to resort to the laborious expedient of retracing
the whole path synthetically. As Duharnel, in his treatise
Des Methodes dans les Sciences de Raisonnement (pt. i. c. 5),
has pointed out, it is enough if, at the different stages of
the deduction, the inquirer assures himself, as he easily may
do where it is the fact, that there is perfect "reciprocity"
among the propositions successively obtained from the one
first assumed ; meaning that, in the circumstances of the
deduction, each may as well follow from the one coming
after as it is fitted to yield that. And the same simple ex-
pedient suffices equally to obviate the less grave defect above
noted in analysis carried out by regression from consequents
to conditions, or conclusions to premisses ; reciprocity, if it
can be made out here at the different stages, will guarantee
the exclusive validity of the line of reasoning taken. So
may analysis become perfectly independent as a method of
discovery, and give as much insight as synthesis, where
this is directly applicable, does ; while it is — what synthesis
is not directly — applicable to every kind of question, how-
ever complex.
It is unnecessary, for the purposes of the present article,
to enter further into details respecting the methods anciently
practised in geometry. Let it suffice to mention only the
method of indirect proof known as reductio ad absurdum,
employed sometimes by Euclid in the Elements. This con-
forms to the type of analysis in that it starts from the
90 ANALYSIS.
question to be determined, though it is peculiar in following
out, not the assumption itself, but what is thereby suggested
as excluded, with the final result that the point in question
is established upon the ruin of every other supposition.
It is a method of discovery as well as a method of demon-
stration ; while the previous argument has shown that
analysis, directly practised, may be made a method of
demonstration by itself, besides being the most potent and
unfailing instrument of discovery. Also it was seen before
that synthesis may be a method of discovery, though it is
more frequently employed as a method of demonstration in
sequence upon discovery by analysis. To insist thus upon
the double character alike of analysis and synthesis, as
practised in geometry, is of vital importance, because of the
change in application which the terms have undergone
among mathematicians. In modern times analysis has
come to mean the employment of the algebraical and higher
calculus, and synthesis any direct treatment of the properties
of geometrical figures, in the manner of the ancients, with-
out the use of algebraical notation and transformations.
The excuse for the change lies in the fact that, while the
Greeks had only extremely undeveloped means of analysis,
they gave the highest possible finish and exactness to their
synthetic demonstrations and geometrical propositions,
seldom being content to let their discoveries rest upon the
ground of that analysis by which they were made. But
though it has this excuse or motive, the change involves a
misunderstanding, as all mathematicians allow who have
turned their minds seriously to consider the rationale of
their practice. It is, in the first place, clear that only by
the process described above, rightly called analysis, can
anything be determined about the more complex properties
and relations of geometrical figures ; haphazard synthesis
is of no avail. The ancients therefore, in their geometry,
had an analysis. It is next to be remarked that the alge-
braical solution of problems is not so exclusively analytic
in character that it may not in simple cases assume the form of
direct (algebraical) synthesis ; and in all cases, for verification,
it admits of being followed up by an exposition that is truly
synthetic. The moderns, therefore, in their calculus, are not
ANALYSIS. 91
without their synthesis. Furthermore, the ancients, however
little progress they made, comparatively speaking, in the
general science of calculation, and however their special
methods for the resolution of geometrical questions, even as
involving direct figured construction, still more as applying
calculation, fell short of the variety and pliability of modern
devices, yet had their own analytical weapons, though they
cannot be specified here. For our present purpose it is equally
unnecessary to enter into details as regards the modern
devices, whether belonging to the lower or higher analysis, or
as regards the principle for applying them developed by
Descartes and his successors ; but to arrogate for these
exclusively the name of analysis, it cannot be too pointedly
declared, is to lose sight of the end in the means.
II. Chemical Analysis and Synthesis. — After mathematics,
chemistry is the science in which application has most
expressly been made of processes termed analysis and
synthesis. In physics, regarded as the science of motion,
whether abstractly taken or as manifested actually in
natural bodies, the application is universal ; the resolution
and composition of velocities, motions, and forces being
fundamental processes pervading the whole science under
all variety of circumstances. There is nothing, however, in
such an employment of analysis and synthesis that is not
easily intelligible in the light of the processes as practised
either in the more general science of mathematics, dealing
with relations of quantity in number and form, or in the
more special science of chemistry, which deals with those
characteristic qualities of actual bodies for which no definite
expression in terms of motion can be found.
The concrete substances in nature are found to be such
that some by no means in our power can be brought to
anything simpler, while others can be broken up into con-
stituents differing in character from the original substances
and also among themselves. Hence a division is made of
bodies into elements and compounds ; elements being all
such bodies, not farther reducible, as are either actually
found in nature, or, though not so found, have emerged in
the manipulation of actual bodies ; compounds, all such as,
being actually found, are reducible to two or more different
92 ANALYSIS.
elements, or have by artificial combination been constituted.
The process of reduction to elements is called analysis ; the
process of re-combination or free combination is called
synthesis. When the analysis is carried out simply with
the view of detecting what elements are present in a sub-
stance, it is called qualitative ; and quantitative, if with the
further view of determining the definite proportions (by
weight) in which the constituents are present in a definite
quantity of the substance. There are corresponding
varieties of synthesis.
Now here the subject-matter is so manifestly different
from what it is in mathematics, that it is idle to look for
exact correspondence in the processes practised under the
same names within the two sciences. In fact, however, the
correspondence is greater than may at first sight appear.
Chemical analysis of a given substance is a process of dis-
covery real and actual, like the analysis of a mathematical
problem, and proceeds similarly by taking what is given,
and working with it in relation to other substances, to see
whether it can be made to yield up aught that is already
known, or may be regarded as fixed and certain. Again,
just as mathematical synthesis may be a process of inven-
tion, either generally, by way of combination of principles,
or sometimes specially, in reference to particular questions,
so does chemical synthesis give a knowledge of new forms
of matter, or haply solve the question as to the constitution
of particular substances in hand. Once more, the relation
of analysis and synthesis as two complementary phases of
one process (instead of their being regarded as two pro-
cesses) is exhibited as plainly in chemistry as in mathematics.
It may seem to be exhibited even more impressively, when
the very constituents got out by analysis of a substance are
used in the synthesis to give it being again. This circum-
stance, however, is far from giving to the science of chemistry
a character of evidence superior to that of mathematics : its
inferiority in this respect is but too well marked, and has a
reason that at the same time explains what else is peculiar
in its application of analysis and synthesis. The chemist
deals with things known only by experience, and connected
by way of physical causation : true, they are things with
ANALYSIS. 93
which he can freely experiment — and this gives to chemistry
a prerogative character among the natural sciences — but the
things are taken as _they are found, and experience is con-
stantly disclosing in each new attributes, which have
simply to be accepted, at least in the present state of our
knowledge, by the side of the others. On the contrary, the
mathematician deals with things over which he has full
power of construction, and whose relations in the fact of
constructing he constitutes, whether they are internal or ex-
ternal relations. But positive construction carries with it
an insight which is wanting in experiment, be the physical
conditions ever so favourable ; and thus analysis and syn-
thesis have in mathematics, along with perfect freedom of
scope, a determinateness far surpassing anything that is
attainable in chemistry.
III. Psychological Analysis and Synthesis. — Passing for
the next signal application of analysis from the world of
matter to mind, we have here a subject which more perhaps
than any other calls for an exercise of the process in order
to be scientifically understood. Phj^sical things in their
superficial relations lie to a great extent open to direct ap-
prehension, and, whatever deeper connexions there may be
to be traced out among things the most remote in their
nature as apprehended, yet the fact of their separation in
space involved in our perception of them is already some-
thing done, leaving the scientific function (analytic and
synthetic) to be exercised chiefly in the attempt to compre-
hend them. Very different is the state of affairs in mind,
where everything, as it were, runs or melts into everything
else. Even to lay hold of particular mental phenomena,
with a view to the explanation of them, implies already an
express scientific attitude, which must be called analytic.
Particular mental states being supposed to be got, with
such definiteness of apprehension (always more or less
imperfect) as the subject-matter admits of, the business of
the psychologist becomes substantially one with that of the
physical inquirer. Accordingly, it is often urged that com-
plex mental states conform to the two types of mechanical
and chemical composition, in the sense that some are to be
resolved after the manner of complex phenomena of motion,
94 ANALYSIS.
and others by a process analogous to that employed in
chemistry for the qualities of concrete substances. The
analogy, however, especially in the second class of states, is
decidedly loose. Psychological phenomena of cognition or
emotion, held to be developed, under general mental laws,
out of simpler states of sense, resemble chemical compounds
only in having a character unlike that of any of the elements
that go to make them ; in particular, they do not admit of that
actual resolution into their elements which lends so much
evidence to the processes of chemistry. The realm of
nature supplies a far apter analogy in the phenomena of
organic growth, more especially as mental states do, in fact,
stand in direct relation with states of the bodily organism.
It is as impossible to make an actual analysis or synthesis
of the physiological complex of life as of the psychological
complex of mind ; and it is only more difficult (the pheno-
mena being undoubtedly more recondite and fluctuating) to
practise experiments in psychology than in physiology.
But, at all events, there is no new principle involved in the
scientific treatment of mind ; nor again in the treatment of
moral and social questions, for an insight into which psycho-
logical knowledge is indispensable.
IV. Logical Analysis and Synthesis. — To logic, taken in
its widest sense as the methodology of all science, it belongs
to appreciate the general import of all such applications of
analysis and synthesis as have now been considered. There
remains, however, a special variety which is itself entitled
logical analysis and synthesis, and which has the more
carefully to be distinguished from the other heads, because
it stands in an opposition to them all.
Logical analysis is the same process as that which is
otherwise called metaphysical division. (The process called
logical division is different.) Given, say, a concrete subject
like man, this may be divided physically into a number of
parts in space, or, as a concept, metaphysically into a
number of qualities or attributes, — metaphysically, because
none of these has an independent subsistence or physical
existence apart. They are distinguished in the way of
mental consideration, or, as it is technically called, abstrac-
tion ; and, this being a thought-process or logical act, the
ANALYSIS. 95
resolution of the given complex into such conceptual elements
gets the name also of logical analysis. The corresponding
act of synthesis proceeds by the way that is technically
called determination ; thus the general concept man, to take
the traditional example, has the attribute of rational joined
to the attributes of animal, or is determined by that addition,
and much else has to be added in a similar way before the
particular concrete can be determined.
Now it is evident that such analysis and synthesis have
an application to any kind of thought that the mind can
conceive ; and thus logicians, in meaning, as they have
commonly done, nothing more by the names, have sig-
nalised processes that are in truth of no small account for
knowledge in general. There is no kind of scientific
inquiry, strictly so called, and whatever be its scope and
method, that does not involve at all stages from the first
such analysis or abstract mental consideration. Nay, it
may be said that science, as opposed to the natural experi-
ence of things, or to the artistic interest which centres
upon fully bodied-out concretes, is analysis in this pre-
sent sense, everywhere breaking up to find community of
character under the mask of superficial difference, and sift-
ing out the one from the many. But when logicians, not
disregarding the various applied methods of the real
sciences or consciously excluding them as lying beyond the
province of pure logic, would seek to reduce all scientific
procedure to this kind of mental action, the attempt implies
a deep misapprehension. It is one thing for the mind to
have its subject of inquiry clearly and sharply defined
apart from what else is given therewith, or again to have
its existing knowledge always well in hand and sifted out
to the uttermost ; it is another thing for the mind to be
making advances, to be passing out from the known to the
unknown, or labouring to bring the unknown into relation
with that which is known already. Condillac is the thinker
who has most expressly made the attempt to bring all
scientific method back to the conception of mere logical
analysis, repeating it everywhere throughout his works.
The sixteenth chapter of his unfinished treatise, the
Langue des Calculs, may especially be noted in this respect ;
96 ANALYSIS.
the more because he there endeavours to justify his de-
veloped expression for the procedure of all science — that it
consists in a continued substitution of identical propositions
—by the actual solution of an algebraical problem. Simple,
however, though the instance chosen is, he fails to make
good his view, appearing to prove it only by leaving out the
step of critical moment.
To analysis and synthesis in the specially logical sense is
undoubtedly related the distinction that logicians have made
of analytic and synthetic method. Without stepping beyond
the bounds of logic conceived as a formal doctrine, a fourth
department, under the name of Method or Disposing, may
be added to the three departments regularly assigned —
Conceiving (Simple Apprehension), Judging, Reasoning;
and this would consider how reasonings, when employed
continuously upon any matter whatever, should be set forth
to produce their combined effect upon the mind. The
question is formal, being one of mere exposition, and con-
cerns the teacher in relation to the learner. How should
results, attained by continuous reasoning, be set before the
mind of a learner? Upon a line representing the course by
which they were actually wrought out? Or always in the
fixed order of following from express principles to which
preliminary assent is required? If the latter, all teaching
becomes synthetic, and follows a progressive route from
principles to conclusions, even when discovery (supposing
discovery foregone) was made by analysis or regression to
principles ; of which expository method no better illustration
could be given than the practice of Euclid in the demon-
strations of his Elements. On the other hand, it may be
said that the line of discovery is itself the line upon which
the truth about any question can best be expounded or
understood, for the same reason that was found successful
in discovery, namely, that the mind (now of the learner) has
before it something quite definite and specific to start from ;
upon which view, the method of exposition should be
analytic or regressive to principles, at least wherever the
discovery took that route. The blending of both methods,
where possible, is doubtless most effective ; otherwise it
depends upon circumstances — chiefly the character of the
ANALYSIS. 97
learner, but also the nature of the subject in respect of
complexity — which should be preferred, when one alone is
followed.
The question of prime logical, or general, importance
remaining is to determine the relation of Analysis and
Synthesis as methods of real science, to the ground-processes
Df all reasoning, known since the days of Aristotle under
the names of Induction and Deduction. Much difference
of opinion has been expressed on this subject, not only
because of the want of agreement as to what should be
called analysis and synthesis, but also because of more
fundamental disagreement regarding the nature of the
inductive and deductive processes.
It was remarked before as somewhat surprising, that
Aristotle himself did not more expressly consider the re-
lation, when we have seen that he was familiar with the
process of geometrical analysis, under the very name. The
distinction, however, upon which he lays so much stress
throughout his works, between knowledge from principles,
prior or better known by nature, and knowledge of or from
facts, prior in experience or relatively to us, has generally
been understood to imply a connexion of synthesis with
deduction, of analysis with induction ; so much so indeed,
that synthetic and deductive method, analytic and inductive
method, have come to be used respectively almost as inter-
changeable terms. Nor, although Sir William Hamilton
seems to wish to reverse the usual association of the terms,
when he calls induction a purely synthetic process, and
declares it to be erroneously viewed as analytic (Metaphysics,
i. 102), is he really at variance with the other authorities;
his observation having a special reference which the others
also might allow. But any such association seems to rest
upon a misconception, not to be laid to the charge of
Aristotle himself. In the sense of analysis and synthesis
for which it is important to determine the relation, namely,
when they are taken as the means of real discovery in
science, the true view rather is that they are the different
methods in which reasoning, whether inductive or deductive,
must be applied for discovering truth in the form of special
7
98 ANALYSIS.
or particular questions. Analysis, as well as synthesis, may
proceed by way of deduction, as we have seen in the process
of mathematics ; on the other hand, synthesis as applied in
chemistry is as much an inductive act, being strictly experi-
mental, as anything could well be. Induction and deduction
are concerned about the relation of the particular and
general in thought ; analysis and synthesis about the
relation of the known and the unknown. The two points
of view are of course related to each other : analysis and
synthesis, as practised by the human mind, either for
purposes of science or in the affairs of life, cannot be worked
except under those highest laws of the relation between the
particular and general in thought which Aristotle's genius
first was able to extract from the instinctive practice of
human reason. But whether the processes are applied singly,
or, for greater assurance, conjointly, it depends upon the
matter of the inquiry under which laws — those of induction
or those of deduction — they shall be worked ; and in any
case there is implied a peculiar intellectual attitude different
from that of mere formal reasoning. It is the difference
between the act of finding out and proving. If it should
ever become possible to develop a logic of Discovery, it must
consist in the formulation of the processes of Analysis and
Synthesis, conceived in the general sense attributed to them
in the foregoing article.
ANALYTIC JUDGMENTS.1
ANALYTIC JUDGMENTS have been distinguished under that
name, in opposition to Synthetic, since the time of Kant.
It was necessary, for the purposes of his critical inquiry
into the principles of human knowledge, that he should
carefully determine the character, of those assertions which
metaphysicians had so freely made respecting the super-
natural, and he found them to be such that, while the
predicate was added on to the subject, not involved in it,
the connexion was affirmed as necessary and universal.
He therefore called them, as well as other assertions of
like character in mathematics and pure physics, synthetic
judgments a priori, and the aim of his critical inquiry came
to be the determining of the conditions under which such
judgments were possible. Now, as differing from these, he
noted two classes of judgments : (1), such as in the predi-
cate added indeed to the content of the subject, but only
empirically, as, for example, Bodies have weight, and these
he called synthetic a posteriori ; (2), such as were indeed
necessary and universal, but added nothing to the content
of the subject, as, for example, Bodies are extended, and
these he called analytic.
The general distinction of analytic and synthetic judg-
ments has a value apart from the specific character of those
(synthetic) judgments in which Kant was most interested,
and for the sake of which mainly it was fixed by him.
Trained in the metaphysics of the Leibnizo-Wolffian
school, which marked off necessary judgments from those
of simple fact without considering the kinds of necessity,
Kant, when he came, by the route that can be traced in his
earlier works, to apprehend the difference between merely
logical analysis and real synthesis in thought, applied it
1 Encyclopcedia Britannica, 9th ed.
100 ANALYTIC JUDGMENTS.
almost exclusively to those judgments for which .a character
of necessity was claimed. He therefore noticed traces of
the distinction in other thinkers, as Locke, only in so far
as there was a suggestion also of this special reference. In
truth, the general distinction, under a variety of expres-
sions, was familiar to both Hume and Locke, and it had
already been drawn by the ancients. The old doctrine of
the Predicables, in distinguishing the essential predication
of genus, species, and difference from the non-essential
predication of property and accident, plainly involves it ;
making besides, as between the last two predicables, a
distinction which is very closely related to that drawn by
Kant between the a priori and a posteriori synthetic.
From the nominalistic point of view it is expressed by the
difference of Verbal and Beal propositions, as in Mill's
Logic, and also often in Locke.
While the synthetic judgment, as the name implies,
brings together in thought two distinct concepts, each of
which may be thought apart, the analytic judgment is
merely the explication of a single concept in the form of a
proposition. It is disputed what may be the ground of
synthesis in different cases, but on all hands it is agreed
that the logical Law of Contradiction is the controlling
principle for the explication of concepts already in the
mind, however they may have come there. Now the ex-
plication may be made either completely or partially, accord-
ing as the whole or part only of the intension of the concept
is set forth : in other words, the aim may be to give the
definition (where, in the full sense, that is possible), or
simply to express any one or more of the contained attri-
butes. Propositions giving such partial explication are
spoken of by Locke as " trifling" ; and it is true that, if the
concept is supposed already in the mind, no increase of
knowledge is thereby obtained. This word, however, is
unfortunate. Not to say that it is equally applicable to
definitions, where the explication is only more complete,
it tends to keep out of view the fact that analytic judg-
ments, when not arbitrarily formed, are themselves — or
rather the concepts, of which they are the explications,
are — the permanent result or deposit of foregone real syn-
ANALYTIC JUDGMENTS. 101
thesis. So much, indeed, is this the case with concepts
of things in nature — what Mill calls natural kinds — that in
them a constant process of accretion is going on ; new
attributes, as they are discovered, being taken up into the
essence, if they are at the same time characteristic and
underived. Much also that is mere explication to one mind
is real information to another.
The terms Analytic and Synthetic, thus applied to judg-
ments, are so expressive in themselves that they have now
come into general use. It is, however, a serious drawback
to such an association of the terms, that it traverses what
is otherwise the consistent use of the words analysis and
synthesis in relation to each1 other. As the article ANALYSIS
has shown, there is a synthesis which, as much as any
analysis, is purely logical, and there is an analysis which,
as much as any synthesis, is a means of real advance in
knowledge. The terms Explicative (Erlduterungsurtheile)
and Ampliative (Erweiterungsurtheile], also employed by
Kant, while not less expressive, are open to no such objec-
tion.
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.1
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS, or MENTAL ASSOCIATION, is a general
name used in psychology to express the conditions under
which representations arise in consciousness, and also is
the name of a principle of explanation put forward by an
important school of thinkers to account generally for the
facts of mental life. The more common expression, from
the time of Locke, who seems to have first employed it,
has been Association of Ideas ; but it is allowed or urged on
all hands that this phrase contains too narrow a reference ;
association, in either of the senses above noted, extending
beyond ideas or thoughts proper to every class of mental
states. In the long and erudite Note D**, appended by
Sir W. Hamilton to his edition of Eeid's Works, and
offered as a contribution towards a history of the doctrine
of mental suggestion or association, many anticipations
of modern statements are cited from the works of ancient
or mediaeval thinkers, and for Aristotle, in particular, the
glory is claimed of having at once originated the doctrine
and practically brought it to perfection. Aristotle's enuncia-
tion of the doctrine is certainly very remarkable. As trans-
lated by Hamilton, but without his interpolations, the
classical passage from the tract De Memoria et Hemini-
scentia runs as follows :—
When, therefore, we accomplish an act of reminiscence, we pass
through a certain series of precursive movements, until we arrive at a
movement on which the one we are in quest of is habitually consequent.
Hence, too, it is that we hunt through the mental train, excogitating
from the present or some other, and from similar or contrary or coad-
jacent. Through this process reminiscence takes place. For the move-
ments are, in these cases, sometimes at the same time, sometimes parts
of the same whole, so that the subsequent movement is already more
than half accomplished.
The passage is obscure (leaving open to Hamilton to
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed.
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 108
suggest a peculiar interpretation of it, that may be noticed
in connexion with the elaborate doctrine of association put
forward by himself, as if to evince the shortcomings rather
than the perfection of Aristotle's), but it does in any case
indicate the various principles commonly termed Contiguity,
Similarity, and Contrast ; and, though the statement of
these cannot be said to be followed up by an effective ex-
position or application, it quite equals in scope the observa-
tions of many a modern inquirer. Zeno the Stoic also, and
Epicurus, according to the report of Diogenes Laertius
(vii. § 52, x. § 32, overlooked by Hamilton), enumerated
similar principles of mental association. By St. Augustin
at the end of his long rhapsody on the wonders of memory
in book x. of his Confessions, it \\as noted (c. 19) that the
mind, when it tries to remember something it knows it
has forgotten, has, as it were, hold of part and thence makes
quest after the other part. Meanwhile and later, Aristotle's
doctrine received a more or less intelligent expansion and
illustration from the ancient commentators and the school-
men ; and in the still later period of transition from the
age of scholasticism to the time of modern philosophy, pro-
longed in the works of some writers far into the seventeenth
century, Hamilton, from the stores of bis learning, is able
to adduce not a few philosophical authorities who gave
prominence to the general fact of mental association — the
Spaniard Ludovicus Vives (1492-1540) especially being most
exhaustive in his account of the conditions of memory.
This act of justice, however, once rendered to earlier
inquirers, it is to modern views of association that atten-
tion may fairly be confined.
In Hobbes's psychology so much importance is assigned
to what he called, variously, the succession, sequence,
series, consequence, coherence, train, &c., of imaginations
or thoughts in mental discourse, that he has not seldom
been regarded, by those who did not look farther back, as
the founder of the theory of mental association. He did,
indeed, vividly conceive and illustrate the principle of
Contiguity, but, as Hamilton conclusively shows, he repro-
duced in his exposition but a part of the Aristotelian
doctrine, nor even this without wavering : representing the
104 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
sequence of images, in such states as dreams, now (in his
Human Nature} as casual or incoherent, now (in Levia-
than), following Aristotle, as simply unguided. Not before
Hume, among the moderns, is there express question as to
a number of distinct principles of association. Locke had,
meanwhile, introduced the phrase Association of Ideas as
the title of a supplementary chapter incorporated with the
fourth edition of his Essay, meaning it, however, only as
the name of a principle accounting for the mental pecu-
liarities of individuals, with little or no suggestion of its
general psychological import. Of this last Hume had the
strongest impression, and thinking himself, in forgetfulness
or ignorance of Aristotle's doctrine of reminiscence, the
first inquirer that had ever attempted to enumerate all the
modes of normal association among mental states, he
brought them to three — Resemblance, Contiguity in time
and place, Cause and (or) Effect. Without professing to
arrive at this result otherwise than by an inductive con-
sideration of instances, he yet believed his enumeration to
be exhaustive, and sought to prove it so by resolving
Contrast — one of Aristotle's heads, commonly received —
as a mixture of causation and resemblance. Viewed in
relation to his general philosophical position, it must
always remain a perplexing feature of Hume's list of
principles, that he specified Causation as a principle dis-
tinct from Contiguity in time, while otherwise the list has
no superiority to Aristotle's. Hume's fellow-countrymen,
Gerard and Beattie, in opposition to him, recurred accord-
ingly to the traditional enumeration ; and, in like manner,
Dugald Stewart put forward Resemblance, Contrariety,
and Vicinity in time and place, though he added, as
another obvious principle, accidental coincidence in the
sounds of Words, and farther noted three other cases
of relation, namely, Cause and Effect, Means and End,
and Premisses and Conclusion, as holding among the
trains of thought under circumstances of special atten-
tion. Reid, preceding Stewart, was rather disposed, for
his own part, to make light of the subject of associa-
tion, vaguely remarking that it seems to require no other
original quality of mind but the power of habit to explain
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 105
the spontaneous recurrence of trains of thinking, when
become familiar by frequent repetition (Intellectual Powers,
p. 387). The counter-observation of his editor, Hamilton,
that we can as well explain habit by association as associa-
tion by habit, might with reason have been pointed more
sharply.
Hamilton's own theory of mental reproduction, sugges-
tion, or association, given in outline in Note D*** follow-
ing the historical note before mentioned, at the end of
his edition of Reid's Works, calls for more special notice,
as perhaps the most elaborate expression yet devised for
the principles involved in the phenomena of mental repre-
sentation. It is a development, greatly modified, of the
doctrine expounded in his Lectures on Metaphysics (vol. ii.
p. 223, seg.), which, in agreement with some foreign
authorities, reduced the principles of association first to
two — Simultaneity and Affinity, and these farther to one
supreme principle of Redintegration or Totality. In the
ultimate scheme he posits no less than four general laws of
mental succession concerned in reproduction : (1) Associa-
bility or possible co-suggestion (all thoughts of the same
mental subjects are associable, or capable of suggesting each
other) ; (2) Repetition or direct remembrance (thoughts
coidentical in modification, but differing in time, tend to
suggest each other) ; (3) Redintegration, direct remem-
brance or reminiscence (thoughts once coidentical in time
are, however different as mental modes, again suggestive
of each other, and that in the mutual order which they
originally held) ; (4) Preference (thoughts are suggested
not merely by force of the general subjective relation sub-
sisting between themselves, they are also suggested in
proportion to the relation of interest, from whatever
source, in which they stand to the individual mind). Upon
these follow, as special laws : A, Primary — modes of the
laws of Repetition and Redintegration — (1), law of Similars
(Analogy, Affinity) ; (2), law of Contrast ; (3), law of Coad-
jacency (Cause and Effect, &c.) ; B, Secondary — modes of
the law of Preference, under the law of Possibility — (1),
laws of Immediacy and Homogeneity ; (2), law of Facility.
Such is the scheme ; and now may be understood what
10() ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
interpretation Hamilton desires to put upon Aristotle's
doctrine, when he finds or seeks in it a parallel relation to
that established by himself between the general laws, more
especially Redintegration, and his special ones. But,
though the commentary of Thernistius, which he cites,
lends some kind of support to the position, it cannot be
maintained without putting the greatest strain on Aristotle's
language, and in one place it is as good as surrendered by
Hamilton himself (footnote, p. 900, 6). Nor is the ascrip-
tion of such a meaning at all necessary to establish Aristotle's
credit as regards the doctrine of mental association.
Thus far the principles of association have been con-
sidered only as involved in mental reproduction and repre-
sentation. There has grown up, however, especially in
England, the psychological school above mentioned, which
aims at explaining all mental acquisitions, and the more
complex mental processes generally, under laws not other
than those determining simple reproduction. Hamilton
also, though professing, in the title of his outline just
noticed, to deal with reproduction only, formulates a num-
ber of still more general laws of mental succession— law of
Succession, law of Variation, law of Dependence, law of
Relativity or Integration (involving law of Conditioned),
and, finally, law of Intrinsic or Objective Relativity — as
the highest to "which human consciousness is subject ; but
it is in a sense quite different that the psychologists of the
so-called Associationist School intend their appropriation
of the principle or principles commonly signalised. As far
as can be judged from imperfect records, they were antici-
pated to some extent by the experientialists of ancient
times, both Stoic and Epicurean (cf. Diogenes Laertius, as
above). In the modern period, Hobbes is the first thinker
of permanent note to whom the doctrine may be traced.
Though he took, as has been seen, anything but an
exhaustive view of the phenomena of mental succession,
yet, after dealing with trains of imagination, or what he
called mental discourse, he sought in the higher depart-
ments of intellect to explain reasoning as a discourse in
words, dependent upon an arbitrary system of marks, each
associated with, or standing for, a variety of imaginations;
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 107
and, save for a general assertion that reasoning is a reckon-
ing— otherwise, a compounding and resolving — he had no
other account of knowledge to give. The whole emotional
side of mind, or, in his language, the passions, he, in like
manner, resolved into an expectation of consequences based
on past experience of pleasures and pains of sense. Thus,
though he made no serious attempt to justify his analysis
in detail, he is undoubtedly to be classed with the associa-
tionists of the next century — Hartley and the others. They,
however, were wont to trace the first beginnings of their
psychological theory no farther back than to Locke's Essay.
If this seems strange, when Locke did little more than
supply them with the word Association, it must be re-
membered in what ill repute the name of Hobbes stood,
and also that Locke's work, though not directly concerned
with the question of psychological development, being rather
of metaphysical or logical import, was eminently psycho-
logical in spirit, and might fairly be held to contain in an
implicit form the principle or principles evolved later by
the associationists. Berkeley, dealing, immediately after
Locka and altogether in Locke's spirit, with the special
psychological problem of visual perception, was driven to
posit expressly a principle of suggestion or association in
these terms : "That one idea may suggest another to the
mind, it will suffice that they have been observed to go
together, without any demonstration of the necessity of
their coexistence, or so much as knowing what it is that
makes them so to coexist " (New Theory of Vision, § 25) ;
and to support the obvious application of the principle to
the case of .the sensations of sight and touch before him,
he constantly urged that association of sound and sense of
language which the later school has always put in the fore-
ground, whether as illustrating the principle in general or
in explanation of the supreme importance of language for
knowledge. It was natural, then, that Hume, coming after
Berkeley, and assuming Berkeley's results, though he re-
verted to the larger inquiry of Locke, should be more
explicit in his reference to association ; and, not only
explicit, he was original also, when he spoke of it as a
" kind of attraction which in the mental world will be
108 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural,
and to show itself in as many and as various forms "
(Human Nature, i. 1, § 4). Other inquirers were, in fact,
appearing about the same time, who conceived of associa-
tion with this breadth of view, and set themselves to track,
as psychologists, its effect in detail.
Hartley's Observations on Man, published in 1749 (eleven
years after the Human Nature, and one year after the
better-known Inquiry, of Hume), opened the path for all
the investigations of like nature that have since that time
become so characteristic of the English name in psychology.
According to his own statement, his attention was first
turned to the subject about eighteen years before, through
what he heard of an opinion of the " Eev. Mr. Gay," that
it was possible to deduce all our intellectual pleasures and
pains from association. Gay is known only by a disserta-
tion on the fundamental principles of virtue, prefixed,
at first anonymously, in 1731, to Archdeacon (afterwards
Bishop) Law's translation of King's Origin of Evil, wherein
it was maintained, with considerable force, that by associa-
tion the feelings belonging to ends may come to attach
themselves to means, and give rise to action for the means
as if they were ends, as seen (the instance has become a
commonplace) in the passion for money-making. In this
vein, but on a very different scale, Hartley proceeded to
work. A physician by profession, and otherwise well versed
in science, he sought to combine with an elaborate theory
of mental association a minutely detailed hypothesis as to
the corresponding action of the nervous system, based upon
the suggestion of a vibratory motion within the nerves
thrown out by Newton in the last paragraph of the
Principia. So far, however, from promoting the acceptance
of the psychological theory, this physical hypothesis proved
to have rather the opposite effect, and it began to be
dropped by Hartley's followers (as Priestley, in his abridged
edition of the Observations, 1775) before it was seriously
impugned from without. When it is studied in the
original, and not taken upon the report of hostile critics,
who would not, or could not — at all events, who did not—
understand it, no little importance must still be accorded to
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 109
the first attempt, not seldom a curiously felicitous one, to
carry through that parallelism of the physical and psychical
which since then has come to count for more and more
in the science of mind. Nor should it be forgotten that
Hartley himself, for all .his paternal interest in the
doctrine of vibrations, was careful to keep separate from
its fortunes the cause of his other doctrine of mental
association. Of this the point lay in no mere restatement,
with new precision, of a principle of coherence among
" ideas," but in its being taken as a clue by which to
follow the progressive development of the mind's powers.
Holding that mental states could be scientifically under-
stood only as they were analysed, Hartley sought for a
principle of synthesis to explain the complexity exhibited
not only in trains of representative images, but alike in the
most involved combinations of reasonings and (as Berkeley
had seen) in the apparently simple phenomena of objective
perception, as well as in the varied play of the emotions,
or, again, in the manifold conscious adjustments of the
motor system. One principle appeared to him sufficient
for all, running, as enunciated for the simplest case, thus :
" Any sensations A, B, C, &c., by being associated with
one another a sufficient number of times, get such a power
over the corresponding ideas (called by Hartley also ves-
tiges, types, images) a, b, c, &c., that any one of the sensa-
tions A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in
the mind b, c, &c., the ideas of the rest". To render the
principle applicable in the cases where the associated
elements are neither sensations nor simple ideas of sensa-
tions, Hartley's first care was to determine the conditions
under which states other than these simplest ones have
their rise in the mind, becoming the matter of ever higher
and higher combinations. The principle itself supplied the
key to the difficulty, when coupled with the notion, already
implied in Berkeley's investigations, of a coalescence of
simple ideas of sensation into one complex idea, which may
cease to bear any obvious relation to its constituents. So
far from being content, like Hobbes, to make a rough
generalisation to all mind from the phenomena of developed
memory, as if these might be straightway assumed, Hartley
110 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
made a point of referring them, in a subordinate place of
their own, to his universal principle of mental synthesis.
He expressly put forward the law of association, endued
with such scope, as supplying what was wanting to Locke's
doctrine in its more strictly psychological aspect, and thus
marks by his work a distinct advance on the line of
development of the experiential philosophy.
The new doctrine received warm support from some, as
Law and Priestley, who both, like Hume and Hartley him-
self, took the principle of association as having the like
import for the science of rnind that gravitation had acquired
for the science of matter. The principle began also, if not
always with direct reference to Hartley, yet, doubtless,
owing to his impressive advocacy of it, to be applied
systematical!}7 in special directions, as by Tucker (1768) to
morals, and by Alison (1790) to aesthetics. Thomas Brown
(d. 1820) subjected anew to discussion the question of
theory. Hardly less unjust to Hartley than Reid or Stewart
had been, and forward to proclaim all that was different in
his own position, Brown must yet be ranked with the
associationists before and after him for the prominence he
assigned to the associative principle in sense-perception
(what he called external affections of mind), and for his
reference of all other mental states (internal affections) to
the two generic capacities or susceptibilities of Simple and
Relative Suggestion. He preferred the word Suggestion to
Association, which seemed to him to imply some prior con-
necting process, whereof there was no evidence in many of
the most important cases of suggestion, nor even, strictly
speaking, in the case of contiguity in time where the term
seemed least inapplicable. According to him, all that
could be assumed was a general constitutional tendency of
the mind to exist successively in states that have certain
relations to each other, of itself only, and without any ex-
ternal cause or any influence previous to that operating at
the moment of the suggestion. Brown's chief contribution
to the general doctrine of mental association, besides what
he did for the theory of perception, was, perhaps, his analysis
of voluntary reminiscence and constructive imagination —
faculties that appear at first sight to lie altogether beyond
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. Ill
the explanatory range of the principle. In James Mill's
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), the
principle, much as Hartley had conceived it, was carried
out, with characteristic consequence, over the psychological
field. With a much enlarged and more varied conception
of association, Prof. Bain has re-executed the general
psychological task in the present generation, while Mr.
Herbert Spencer has revised the doctrine from the new
point of view of the evolution-hypothesis. John Stuart
Mill made only occasional excursions into the region of
psychology proper, but sought, in his System of Logic
(1843), to determine the conditions of objective truth from
the point of view of the associationist theory, and, thus or
otherwise being drawn into general philosophical discussion,
spread wider than any one before him its repute.
It is remarkable that the Associationist School has been
composed chiefly of British thinkers, but in France also it
has had distinguished representatives. Of these it will
suffice to mention Condillac, the author of the sensationalist
movement in the eighteenth century, who professed to
explain all knowledge from the single principle of associa-
tion (liaison) of ideas, operating through a previous associa-
tion with signs, verbal or other. At the present day the
later English school counts important adherents among the
younger French thinkers. In Germany, before the time of
Kant, mental association was generally treated in the
traditional manner, as by Wolff. Kant's inquiry into the
foundations of knowledge, agreeing in its general purport
with Locke's, however it differed in its critical procedure,
brought him face to face with the newer doctrine that had
been grafted on Locke's philosophy ; and to account for the
fact of synthesis in cognition, in express opposition to
associationism, as represented by Hume, was, in truth, his
prime object, starting, as he did, from the assumption that
there was that in knowledge which no mere association
of experiences could explain. To the extent, therefore,
that his influence prevailed, all such inquiries as the English
associationists went on to prosecute were discounted in
Germany. Notwithstanding, under the very shadow of his
authority a corresponding, if not related, movement was
1 12 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
initiated by Herbart. Peculiar, and widely different from
anything conceived by the associationists, as Herbart's
metaphysical opinions were, he was at one with them, and
at variance with Kant, in assigning fundamental importance
to the psychological investigation of the development of
consciousness, nor was his conception of the laws deter-
mining the interaction and flow of mental presentations
and representations, when taken in its bare psychological
import, essentially different from theirs. In Beneke's
psychology also, and in more recent inquiries conducted
mainly by physiologists, mental association has been under-
stood in its wider scope, as a general principle of ex-
planation.
Associationists differ not a little among themselves in
the statement of their principle, or, when they adduce
several principles, in their conception of the relative im-
portance of these. Hartley took account only of Contiguity,
or the repetition of impressions synchronous or immediately
successive ; and the like is true of James Mill, though,
incidentally, he made an express attempt to resolve the
received principle of Similarity, and through this the other
principle of Contrast, into his fundamental law — law of
Frequency, as he sometimes called it, because upon fre-
quency, in conjunction with vividness of impressions, the
strength of association, in his view, depended. In a sense
of his own, Brown also, while accepting the common
Aristotelian enumeration of principles, inclined to the
opinion that " all suggestion may be found to depend on
prior coexistence, or at least on such proximity as is itself
very probably a modification of coexistence," provided
account be taken of "the influence of emotions and other
feelings that are very different from ideas, as when an
analogous object suggests an analogous object by the
influence of an emotion which each separately may have
produced before, and which is, therefore, common to both ".
(Upon which view it obviously occurs to remark, that,
except in the particular case, plainly not intended, where
the objects are experienced in actual succession with the
emotion common to both, a suggestion through similar
emotions must still be presumed.) To the contrary effect,
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
Mr. Spencer maintains that the fundamental law of all
mental association is that presentations aggregate or cohere
with their like in past experience, and that, besides this
law, there is in strictness no other, all further phenomena
of association being incidental. Thus in particular, he
would explain association by Contiguity as due to the
circumstance of imperfect assimilation of the present to
the past in consciousness ; a presentation in as far as it is
distinctly cognised is in fact recognised through cohering
with its like in past experience, but there is always, in
consequence of the imperfection of our perceptions, a
certain range within which the classing of the present
experience with past is doubtful — a certain cluster of rela-
tions nearly like the one perceived, which become nascent
in consciousness in the act of assimilation ; now contiguity
is likeness of relation in time or in space, or in both, and,
when the classing, which, as long as it is general, goes
easily and infallibly forward, becomes specific, a presenta-
tion may well arouse the merely contiguous, instead of the
identical, from former experience. Midway between these
opposed views should be noted, finally, the position of
Prof. Bain, who regards Contiguity and Similarity,
logically, as perfectly distinct principles, though in actual
psychological occurrence they blend intimately with each
other ; contiguous trains being started by a first (it may
be implicit) representation through Similarity, while the
express assimilation of present to past in consciousness is
always, or tends to be, followed by the revival of what was
presented in contiguity with that past.
That Similarity is an ultimate ground of mental associa-
tion cannot seriously be questioned, and to neglect or
discount it, in the manner of the older representatives of
the school, is to render the associationist theory quite
inadequate for purposes of general psychological explana-
tion. It is simply impossible to over-rate the importance of
the principle, and, when Mr. Spencer, by way of supporting
his position, maintains farther, that the psychological fact
of conscious assimilation corresponds with the fundamen-
tally simple physiological fact of re-excitation of the same
nervous structures, the force as well as pertinence of the
8
114 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
observation is at once evident. Nevertheless, it is one
question whether a representation, upon a particular
occasion, shall be evoked by Similarity, and another
question what shall be raised into consciousness along
with it ; nor for this is there any help but in positing
a distinct principle of Contiguity. The phenomena of
presentative cognition or objective perception on which
Mr. Spencer bases his argument, are precisely those in
which the function of Contiguity is least explicitly mani-
fested, but only because of the certainty and fixity it has
assumed through the great uniformity and frequency of
such . experience. Let the series of presentative elements,
as in formal education, be less constant in composition,
and less frequently recurrent, than are those aggregates of
sensible impressions that, in the natural course of experi-
ence, become to us objects in space with a character
comparatively fixed, and then the function of Contiguity
starts out with sufficient prominence, being found as often
as not to fail in determining a revival of the corresponding
representative series. All the phenomena, too, of coales-
cence, in which a variety of elements become fused to a
result in consciousness as heterogeneous as any chemical
compound in relation to its constituents — phenomena that
have remained the very property of the Associationist School
since they first were distinctly noted by Hartley— how are
these to be explained by the principle of Similarity? In-
volved as it incontestably is in every repeated apprehension,
whether of the elements, or of the product, or of the relation
between them, Similarity of itself is powerless to determine
a relation the essence of which lies not more in the hetero-
geneous character of the result than in the diversity of the
elements brought together. Nor, in order to support the
claim of the principle of Contiguity to an equally funda-
mental position with that of Similarity, is it more difficult
to find an expression in terms of physiology corresponding
with the subjective process. The fact that different nerve-
centres are excited together, synchronously or successively,
along definite lines of connexion, will leave them, being
"so connected, in a state of relative instability, which, other
things equal, will vary in proportion to the frequency and
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 115
strength of the excitation ; and thus, when one of them is,
in whatever way, again aroused, the rest will tend to be re-
affected also by reason of the instability that has remained.
The process of psychological representation, running parallel
with the nervous events here supposed, involves assimilation
at every stage from and including the first ; it is also con-
stantly happening, in contiguous trains, that a break occurs
at a particular stage through an express suggestion, by
Similarity, of something foreign to the train. But in the
one case, as in the other — alike coincident with the implicit
action of Similarity, and in the pauses of express assimila-
tion— the principle of Contiguity has a part to play, not to
be denied or confounded with any other.
A minor question, also disputed, is whether, by the side of
Contiguity and Similarity, Contrast should be held, as by
Aristotle, an independent principle of association. That
things contrasted may and do often suggest each other in
consciousness is on all hands allowed, but ever since Hume
attempted, however infelicitously, to resolve the principle
into others, its independence has not ceased to lie under
suspicion. When the question is approached without pre-
judice, it cannot but appear strange that mental states
which suggest each, other because of likeness, should suggest
each other because of unlikeness also. In that case any-
thing might suggest everything else, since like and unlike
conscious states are all that are possible ; nay, unlike states
alone are all, as there must always be some difference
between any two. Now it is true, in one sense, that
anything may suggest anything be it ever so unlike, namely,
if the things have been once or repeatedly experienced in
conjunction ; but then the bond of association is the con-
tiguity, and not the unlikeness, which obviously cannot be
a ground for suggesting this one other thing more than any
other thing. By contrast, however, is not generally meant
bare unlikeness. Genuine contrasts, as black-white, giant-
dwarf, up-down, are peculiar in having under the difference
a foundation of similarity, the two members lying within
the sphere of a common higher notion, and only being
distinguished the more impressively by reason of the ac-
companying unlikeness. Clearly, in the case of mutual
116 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
suggestion, if it be not the similarity itself that is here
the ground of association, it may again be Contiguity, the
sharpest experience of each member of the contrast having
been when there was experience also of the other ; or both
grounds may conspire towards the result, the association
being then what Prof. Bain has marked as Compound.
On the whole, it must be concluded that only in a secondary
sense can Contrast be admitted as a principle of mental
association.
The highest philosophical interest, as distinguished from
that which is more strictly psychological, attaches to the
mode of mental association called Inseparable. The coales-
cence of mental states noted by Hartley, as it had been
assumed by Berkeley, was farther formulated by James Mill
in these terms : —
Some ideas are by frequency and strength of association so closely
combined that they cannot be separated ; if one exists, the other exists
along with it in spite of whatever effort we make to disjoin them.
(Analysis of the Human Mind, 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 93.)
J. S. Mill's statement is more guarded and particular : —
When two phenomena have been very often experienced in con-
junction, and have not, in any single instance, occurred separately either
in experience or in thought, there is produced between them what has
been called inseparable, or, less correctly, indissoluble, association ; by
which is not meant that the association must inevitably last to the end
of life — that no subsequent experience or process of thought can possibly
avail to dissolve it ; but only that as long as no such experience or
process of thought has taken place, the association is irresistible ; it is
impossible for us to think the one thing disjoined from the other.
(Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, 2nd ed. p. 19].)
Even this statement, however, is somewhat lacking in
precision, since there never is any impossibility of thinking
the things apart, in the sense of considering them as logi-
cally distinct ; the very fact of association implies at least
such distinctness, while there may be evident, besides, a
positive difference of psychological origin, as when, in the
case of visual extension, the colour of the field is referred
to the passive sensibility of the eye, and the expanse to its
mobility. The impossibility is of representation apart, not
of logical consideration or thought. It is chiefly by J. S.
Mill that the philosophical application of the principle has
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 117
been made. The first and most obvious application is to
so-called necessary truths — such, namely, as are not merely
analytic judgments but involve a synthesis of distinct
notions. Again, the same thinker has sought, in the work
just cited, to prove Inseparable Association the ground of
belief in an external objective world. The former application,
especially, is facilitated, when the experience through which
the association is supposed to be constituted is understood
as cumulative in the race, and transmissible as original en-
dowment to individuals — endowment that may be expressed
either, subjectively, as latent intelligence, or, objectively, as
fixed nervous connexions. Mr. Spencer, as before suggested,
is the author of this extended view of mental association.
For a detailed exposition of the psychological theory of
the Associationist School, the reader is referred to the
works of its latest representatives named above. The
question is still under discussion, how far the theory avails
to account for the facts of intelligence, not to say the
complex phases of mental life in general in all their variety ;
nor, were the theory carried out farther than it has yet been
by any one, and formulated in terms commanding more
general assent than any expression of it has yet obtained
even from professed adherents, is it likely to be raised above
dispute. Yet it must be allowed to stand forward with a
special claim to the scientific character ; as already in his
time Laplace (who, though an outsider, could well judge)
bore witness, when, speaking of the principle of association
(Contiguity) as applied to the explanation of knowledge, he
declared it la partie reelle de la metaphysique (Essai phil. sur
les Probability, (Euvres, vol. vii. p. cxxxvii.). If in the
physical sciences the object of the inquirer is confined to
establishing laws expressive of the relations subsisting
amongst phenomena, then, however different be the internal
world of mind — however short such treatment may seem to
come of expressing the depth and fulness even of its
phenomenal nature — a corresponding object is as much as
the scientific psychologist can well set to himself. The laws
of association express undoubted relations holding among
particular mental states, that are the real or actual facts
with which the psychologist has to deal, and it becomes a
118 ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
strictly scientific task to inquire how far the whole com-
plexity of the internal life may receive an explanation
therefrom. Understood in this sense, Hume's likening of
the laws of mental association to the principle of gravitation
in external nature is perfectly justifiable. It is to the credit
of the associationists to have grasped early, and steadily
maintained, such a conception of psychological inquiry,
and, whatever their defects of execution may have been or
remain, their work retains a permanent value as a serious
attempt to get beyond barren description of abstract mental
faculties to real and effective explanation. The psychologists
that, in the related point of view, have earned the title of
the Analytical School, from holding before their eyes the
exemplar of the method of the positive sciences, are precisely
those that have fastened upon the principles of association
as the ground of mental synthesis ; and, till it is shown that
the whole method of procedure is inapplicable to such a
subject as mind, their conception is entitled to rank as a
truly scientific one.
AXIOM.1
AXIOM, from the Greek a^uo/za, is a word of great im-
port both in general philosophy and in special science ;
it also has passed into the language of common life, being
applied to any assertion of the truth of which the speaker
happens to have a strong conviction, or which is put
forward as beyond question. The scientific use of the
word is most familiar in mathematics, where it is customary
to lay down, under the name of axioms, a number of
propositions of which no proof is given or considered
necessary, though the reason for such procedure may not be
the same in every case, and in the same case may be vari-
ously understood by different minds. Thus scientific axioms,
mathematical or other, are sometimes held to carry with
them an inherent authority or to be self-evident, wherein
it is, strictly speaking, implied that they cannot be made
the subject of formal proof; sometimes they are held to
admit of proof, but not within the particular science in
which they are advanced as principles ; while, again, some-
times the name of axiom is given to propositions that admit
of proof within the science, but so evidently that they
may be straightway assumed. Axioms that are genuine
principles, though raised above discussion within the science,
are not therefore raised above discussion altogether. From
the time of Aristotle it has been claimed for general or first
philosophy to deal with the principles of special science,
and hence have arisen the questions concerning the nature
and origin of axioms so much debated among the philo-
sophic schools. Besides, the general philosopher himself,
having to treat of human knowledge and its conditions as
his particular subject-matter, is called to determine the
principles of certitude, which, as there can be none higher.
1 Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed.
1'2() AXIOM.
must have in a peculiar sense that character of ultimate
authority (however explicable) that is ascribed to axioms ;
and by this name, accordingly, such highest principles of
knowledge have long been called. In the case of a word
so variously employed there is, perhaps, no better way of
understanding its prqper signification than by considering
it first in the historical light — not to say that there hangs
about the origin and early use of the name an obscurity
which it is of importance to dispel.
The earliest use of the word in a logical sense appears
in the works of Aristotle, though, as will presently be
shown, it had probably acquired such a meaning before his
time, and only received from him a more exact determina-
tion. In his theory of demonstration, set forth in the
Posterior Analytics, he gives the name of axiom to that im-
mediate principle of syllogistic reasoning which a learner
must bring with him (i. 2, 6) ; again, axioms are said to be
the common principles from which all demonstration takes
place — common to all demonstrative sciences, but vary-
ing in expression according to the subject-matter of each
(i. 10, 4), The principle of all other axioms— the surest of
all principles — is that called later the principle of Contra-
diction, indemonstrable itself, and thus fitted to be the ground
of all demonstration (Metaph., iii. 2, iv. 3). Aristotle's fol-
lowers, and, later on, the commentators, with glosses of
their own, repeat his statements. Thus, according to
Themistius (ad Post. Anal.), two species of axioms were
distinguished by Theophrastus — one species holding of all
things absolutely, as the principle (later known by the name)
of Excluded Middle, the other of all things of the same
kind, as that the remainders of equals are equal. These,
adds Themistius himself, are, as it were, connate and com-
mon to all, and hence their name Axiom ; " for what is
put over either all things absolutely or things of one sort
universally, we consider to have precedence with respect to
them ". The same view of the origin of the name reappears
in Boethius's Latin substitutes for it — diynitas and maxima
(propositio) , the latter preserved in the word Maxim, which
is often used interchangeably with Axiom. In Aristotle,
however, there is no suggestion of such a meaning. As
AXIOM. 121
the verb a^iovv changes its original meaning of deem worthy
into think Jit, think simply, and also claim or require, it might
as well be maintained that a£{<w/ia — which Aristotle himself
employs in its original ethical sense of worth., also in the
secondary senses of opinion or dictum (Metaph., iii. 4), and
of simple proposition (Topics, viii. 1)— was conferred upon the
highest principles of reasoning and science because the
teacher might require them to be granted by the learner.
In point of fact, later writers, like Proclus and others quoted
by him, did attach to Axiom this particular meaning,
bringing it into relation with Postulate (airrj/aa), as denned
by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics, or as understood by
Euclid in his -Elements. It may here be added that the word
was used regularly in the sense of bare proposition by the
Stoics (Diog. Laert., vii. 65, though Simplicius curiously
asserts the contrary, ad Epict. Ench., c. 58), herein followed
in the later times by the Ramist logicians, and also, in effect,
by Bacon.
That Aristotle did not originate the use of the term axiom
in the sense of scientific first principle, is the natural
conclusion to be drawn from the reference he makes to
"what are called axioms in mathematics" (Metaph., iv. 3).
Sir William Hamilton (Note A, Reid's Works, p. 765) would
have it that the reference is to mathematical works of his
own now lost, but there is no real ground for such a
supposition. True though it be, as Hamilton urges, that
the so-called axioms standing at the head of Euclid's
Elements acquired the name through the influence of the
Aristotelian philosophy, evidence is not wanting that by
the time of Aristotle, a generation or more before Euclid,
it was already the habit of geometricians to give definite
expression to certain fixed principles as the basis of their
science. Aristotle himself is the authority for this assertion,
when, in his treatise De Casio, iii. 4, he speaks of the
advantages of having definite principles of demonstration,
and these as few as possible, such as are postulated by
mathematicians (KaBaTrep d^iovat Kal ol eV rot? /j.adij/j,a^iv),
who always have their principles limited in kind or number.
The passage is decisive on the point of general mathematical
usage, and so distinctly suggests the very word axiom in
1'22 AXIOM.
the sense of a principle assumed or postulated, that
Aristotle's repeated instance of what he himself calls by the
name — If equals be taken from equals, the remainders are
equal — can hardly be regarded otherwise than as a citation
from recognised mathematical treatises. The conclusion,
if warranted, is of no small interest, in view of the famous
list of principles set out by Euclid, which has come to be
regarded in modern times as the typical specimen of
axiomatic foundation for a science.
Euclid, giving systematic form to the elements of geornet^
rical science in the generation after the death of Aristotle,
propounded, at the beginning of his treatise, under the
name of opoi, the definitions with which modern readers are
familiar ; under the name of alr^ara, the three principles
of construction now called postulates, together with the
three theoretic principles, specially geometrical, now printed
as the tenth, the eleventh, and twelfth axioms ; finally, under
the name of KOIVOI ewoial, or common notions, the series of
general assertions concerning equality and inequality, having
an application to discrete as well as continuous quantity,
now printed as the first nine axioms. Now, throughout the
Elements, there are numerous indications that Euclid could
not have been acquainted with the logical doctrines of
Aristotle : a most important one has been signalised in the
article ANALYSIS, and, in general, it may suffice to point out
that Euclid, who is said to have flourished at Alexandria
from 323 (the year of Aristotle's death) to 283 B.C., lived
too early to be affected by Aristotle's work — all the more
that he was, by philosophical profession, a Ptatonist. Yet,
although Euclid's disposition of geometrical principles at
the beginning of his Elements is itself one among the signs
of his ignorance of Aristotle's logic, it would seem that he
had in viewr a distinction between his postulates and com-
mon notions not unlike the Aristotelian distinction between
alnj/jLara and a^Ko^ara. All the postulates of Euclid
(including the last three so-called axioms) may be brought
under Aristotle's description of alnj/jiara — principles con-
cerning which the learner has, to begin with, neither belief
nor disbelief (Post. Anal., i. 10, 6) ; being (as De Morgan
interprets Euclid's meaning) such as the " reader must grant
AXIOM. 123
or seek another system, whatever be his opinion as to the
propriety of the assumption ". Still closer to the Aristotelian
conception of axioms come Euclid's common notions, as
principles " which there is no question every one will grant "
(De Morgan). From this point of view, the composition of
Euclid's two lists, as they originally stood, becomes intelli-
gible : be this, however, as it may, there is evidence that his
enumeration and division of principles were very early
subjected to criticism by his followers with more or less
reference to Aristotle's doctrine. Apollonius (250-220 B.C.)
is mentioned by Proems (Com. in EucL, iii.) as having sought
to give demonstrations of the common notions under the
name of axioms. Further, according to Proclus, Geminus
made the distinction between postulates and axioms which
has become the familiar one, that they are indemonstrable
principles of construction and demonstration respectively.
Proclus himself (412-485 A.D.) practically comes to rest in
this distinction, and accordingly extrudes from the list of
postulates all but the three received in modern times. The
list of axioms he reduces to five, striking out as derivative
the two that assert inequality (4th and 5th), also the two
that assert equality between the doubles and halves of the
.same respectively (6th and 7th). Euclid's postulate re-
garding the equality of right angles and the other assumed
in the doctrine of parallel lines, now printed as the llth
and 12th axioms, he holds to be demonstrable : the 10th axiom
(regarded as an axiom, not a postulate, by some ancient
authorities, and so cited by Proclus himself) — Two straight
lines cannot enclose a space — he refuses to print with the
others, as being a special principle of geometry. Thus he
restricts the name axiom to such principles of demonstration
as are common to the science of quantity generally. These,
he then declares, are principles immediate and self-manifest
— untaught anticipations whose truth is darkened rather than
cleared by attempts to demonstrate them.
The question as to the axiomatic principles, whether of
knowledge in general or of special science', remained where
it had thus been left by the ancients till modern times,
when new advances began to be made in positive scientific
inquiry and a new philosophy took the place of the peri-
1'24 AXIOM.
patetic system, as it had been continued through the
Middle Ages. It was characteristic alike of the philosophic
and of the various scientific movements begun by Descartes,
to be guided by a consideration of mathematical method
— that method which had led in ancient times to special
conclusions of exceptional certainty, and which showed
itself, as soon as it was seriously taken up again, more
fruitful than ever in new results. To establish philosophical
and all special truth after the model of mathematics became
the direct object of the new school of thought and inquiry,
and the first step thither consisted in positing principles
of immediate certainty whence deductions might proceed.
Descartes accordingly devised his criterion of perfect clear-
ness and distinctness of thought for the determination of
ultimate objective truth, and his followers, if not himself,
adopted the ancient word axiom for the principles which,
with the help of the criterion, they proceeded freely to
excogitate. About the same time the authority of all general
principles began to be considered more explicitly in the light
of their origin. Not that ever such consideration had been
wholly overlooked, for, on the contrary, Aristotle, in pro-
nouncing the principles of demonstration to be themselves
indemonstrable, had suggested, however obscurely, a theory
of their development, and his followers, having obscure
sayings to interpret, had been left free to take different sides
on the question ; but, as undoubtedly the philosophic in-
vestigation of knowledge has in the modern period become
more and more an inquiry into its genesis, it was inevitable
that principles claiming to be axiomatic should have their
pretensions scanned from this point of view with closer
vision tban ever before. Locke it was who, when the
Cartesian movement was well advanced, more especially
gave this direction to modern philosophic thought, turning
attention in particular upon the characters of axioms ; nor
was his original impulse weakened — rather it was greatly
strengthened — by his followers' substitution of positive
psychological research for his method of general criticism.
The expressly critical inquiry undertaken by Kant, at
however different a level, had a like bearing on the question
as to the nature of axiomatic principles ; and thus it has
AXIOM. 125
come to pass that the chief philosophic interest now attached
to them turns upon the point whether or not they have
their origin in experience.
It is maintained, on the one hand, that axioms like other
general propositions result from an elaboration of particular
experiences, and that, if they possess an exceptional certainty,
the ground of this is to be sought in the character of the
experiences, as that they are exceptionally simple, frequent,
and uniform. On the other hand, it is held that the special
certainty, amounting, as it does, to positive necessity, is
what no experience, under any circumstances, can explain,
but is conditioned by the nature of human reason. More it
is hardly possible to assert generally concerning the position
of the rival schools of thought, for on each side the
representative thinkers differ greatly in the details of their
explanation, and there is, moreover, on both sides much
difference of opinion as to the scope of the question. Thus
Kant would limit the application of the name axiom to
principles of mathematical science, denying that in phil-
osophy (whether metaphysical or natural), which works
with discursive concepts, not with intuitions, there can be
any principles immediately certain ; and, as a matter of fact,
it is to mathematical principles only that the name is
universally accorded in the language of special science — not
generally, in spite of Newton's lead, to the laws of motion,
and hardly ever to scientific principles of more special range
like the atomic theory. Other thinkers, however, notably
Leibniz, lay stress on the ultimate principles of all thinking
as the only true axioms, and would contend for the possi-
bility of reducing to these (with the help of definitions) the
special principles of mathematics, commonly allowed to pass
and do duty as axiomatic. Still others apply the name
equally and in the same sense to the general principles of
thought and to some principles of special science. In view
of such differences of opinion as to the actual matter in
question, it is not to be expected that there should be
agreement as to the marks characteristic of axioms, nor
surprising that agreement, where it appears to exist, should
often be only verbal. The character of necessity, for
example, so much relied upon for excluding the possibility
12(5 AXIOM.
of an experiential origin, may either, as by Kant, be
carefully limited to that which can be claimed for pro-
positions that are at the same time synthetic, or may be
vaguely taken (as too frequently by Leibniz) to cover neces-
sity of mere logical implication — the necessity of analytic,
including identical, propositions — which Kant allowed to be
quite consistent with origin in experience. The question
being so perplexed, no other course seems open than to try
to determine the nature of axioms mainly upon such in-
stances as are, at least practically, admitted by all, and these
are mathematical principles.
That propositions with an exceptional character of cer-
tainty are assumed in mathematical science, is notorious ;
that such propositions must be assumed as principles of the
science, if it is to be at once general and demonstrative, is
now conceded even by extreme experientialists ; while it is,
further, universally held that it is the exceptional character
of the subject-matter of mathematics that renders possible
such d'eterminate assumptions. What the actual principles
to be assumed are, has, indeed, always been more or less
disputed ; but this is a point of secondary importance, since
it is possible from different sets of assumptions to arrive at
results practically the same. The particular list of proposi-
tions passing current in modern times as Euclid's axioms,
like his original list of common notions, is open to objection,
not so much for mixing up assertions not equally underiva-
tive (as the ancient critics remarked), but for including
two — the 8th and 9th — which are unlike all the others in
being mere definitions (viz., of equals and of whole or part).
Being intended as a body of principles of geometry in
particular within the general science of mathematics, the
modern list is not open to exception in that it adds to the
propositions of general mathematical import, forming Euclid's
original list, others specially geometrical, provided the addi-
tions made are sufficient for the purpose. It doos, in any
case, contain what may be taken as good representative
instances of mathematical axioms both general and special ;
for example, the 1st, Things equal to the same are equal to
one another, applicable to all quantity ; and the 10th, Two
straight lines cannot enclose a space, specially geometrical.
AXIOM. 127
(The latter has been regarded by some writers as either a
mere definition of straight lines, or as contained by direct
implication in the definition ; but incorrectly. If it is held
to be a definition, nothing is too complex to be so called, and
the very meaning of a definition as a principle of science is
abandoned ; while, if it is held to be a logical implication of
the definition, the whole science of geometry may as well
be pronounced a congeries of analytic propositions. When
straight line is strictly defined, the assertion is clearly seen
to be synthetic.) Now of such propositions as the two
just quoted it is commonly said that they are self-evident,
that they are seen to be true as soon as stated, that their
opposites are inconceivable ; and the expressions are not
too strong as descriptive of the peculiar certainty pertaining
to them. Noth.ng, however, is -thereby settled as to the
ground of the certainty, which is the real point in dispute
between the experiential and rational schools, as these have
become determinately opposed since the time and mainly
through the influence of Kant. Such axioms, according to
Kant, being necessary as well as synthetic, cannot be got
from experience, but depend on the nature of the knowing
faculty ; being immediately synthetic, they are not thought
discursively but apprehended by way of direct intuition.
According to the experientialists, as represented by J. S.
Mill, they are, for all their certainty, inductive general-
isations from particular experiences ; only the experiences
are peculiar (as already said) in being extremely simple and
uniform, while the experience of space — Mill does not urge
the like point as regards number — is farther to be distin-
guished from common physical experience in that it supplies
matter for induction no less in the imaginative (representa-
tive) than in the presentative form. Mill thus agrees with
Kant on a vital point in holding the axioms to be synthetic
propositions, but takes little or no account of that which,
in Kant's eyes, is their distinctive characteristic — their valid-
ity as universal truths in the guise of direct intuitions or
singular acts of perception, presentative or representative.
The synthesis of subject and predicate, thus universally
valid though immediately effected, Kant explains by sup-
posing the singular presentation or representation to be
128 AXIOM.
wholly determined from within through the mind's spon-
taneous act, instead of being received as sensible experience
from without ; to speak more precisely, he refers the
apprehension of quantity, whether continuous or discrete,
to "productive imagination," and regards it always as a pure
mental construction. Mill, who supposes all experience
alike to be passively received, or, at all events, makes no
distinction in point of original apprehension between quan-
tity and physical qualities, fails to explain what must be
allowed as the specific character of mathematical axioms.
Our conviction of their truth cannot be said to depend upon
the amount of supporting experience, for increased experi-
ence (which is all that Mill secures and secures only for
figured magnitude, without psychological reason given) does
not make it stronger; and, if they are conceded on being
merely stated, which, unless they are held to be analytic
propositions, amounts to their being granted upon direct
inspection of a particular case, it can be only because the
case, so decisive, is made and not found — is constituted or
constructed by ourselves, as Kant maintains, with the
guarantee for uniformity and adequacy which direct con-
struction alone gives. Still it does not therefore follow that
the construction whereby synthesis of subject and predicate
is directly made, is of the nature described by Kant— due to
the activity of the pure ego, opposed to the very notion of
sensible experience, and absolutely a priori. As we have
a natural" psychological experience of sensations passively
received through bodily organs, we also have what is not
less a natural psychological experience of motor activity
exerted through the muscular system. Only by muscular
movements, of which we are conscious in the act of perform-
ing them, have we perception of objects as extended and
figured, and in itself the activity of the describing and
circumscribing movements is as much matter of experience
as is the accompanying content of passive sensation. At
the same time, the conditions of the active exertion and of
the passive affection are profoundly different. While, in
objective perception, within the same or similar movements,
the content of passive sensation may indefinitely vary beyond
any control of ours, it is at all times in our power to
AXIOM. 129
describe forms by actual movement with or without a
content of sensation, still more by represented or imagined
movement. Our knowledge of the physical qualities of
objects thus becomes a reproduction of our manifold sensible
experience, as this in its variety can alone be reproduced, by
way of general concepts ; our knowledge of their mathe-
matical attributes is, first and last, an act of conscious
production or construction. It is manifestly so, as move-
ment actual or imaginary, in the case of magnitude or
continuous quantity ; nor is it otherwise in the case of
number or discrete quantity, when the units are objects
(points or anything else) standing apart from each other in
space. When the units are not objects presented to the
senses or represented as coexistent in space, but are mere
subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time, the
numerical synthesis, doubtless, proceeds differently, but it
is still an act of construction, dependent on the power we
have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective con-
sciousness. Thus acting constructively in our experience
both of number and form, we, in a manner, make the
ultimate relations of both to be what for us they must be
in all circumstances, and such relations when expressed are
truly axiomatic in every sense that has been ascribed to the
name.
Beyond the mathematical principles which may be thus
accounted for, there are, as was before remarked, no other
principles of special science to which the name of axiom is
uniformly applied. It may now be understood why the
name should be withheld from such a fundamental general-
isation as the atomic theory in chemistry, even when we
have become so familiar with the facts as to seem to see
clearly that the various kinds of matter must combine with
each other regularly in definite proportions : the proposition
answers to no intuition or direct apprehension. At most
could it be called axiomatic in the sense, of course applicable
to mathematical principles also, that it is assumed as true
in the body of science compacted by means of it. The laws
of motion, however, formulated by Newton as principles of
general physics, not only were called by him axiomatic in
this latter sense, but have been given out by others since his
9
130 AXIOM.
time as propositions intuitively certain ; and, though -it
cannot seriously be pretended that there is the same case
for ascribing to them the character of a priori truths, there
must be some reason why the name of axiom in the full
sense has been claimed for them alone by the side of the
mathematical principles. The a priori character, it is clear,
can only in a peculiar sense be claimed for truths which all
the genius of the ancients failed to grasp, and which were
established in far later times as inductions from actual
experiments ; Newton, certainly, in calling them axioms, by
no means claimed for them aught but an experiential origin.
On the other hand, it must be conceded that motion as an
experience has in it a character of simplicity, like that
belonging to number and form, consisting mainly in a clear
apprehension of the circumstances under which the pheno-
menon varies, while, again, such apprehension is condi-
tioned by the psychological nature of the experience, namely,
that it is one depending on activity of our own which we
can control, and does not come to us as bare passive affection
which we must take as we find it. We do in truth make or
constitute motion, as we construct number and space ;
moving, as we please, without external occasion, and, when
apprehending objective movements, following these with
conscious motions of our members. Notwithstanding, our
proper motions far less adequately correspond to the reality
of external motions than do our subjective constructions of
space and number answer to the reality of things figured and
numbered. With limited store of nervous energy and
muscles of confined sweep, we cannot execute at all such
continued unvarying movements as occur, at least approxi-
mately, in nature ; we cannot, by any such combinations of
movements as we are able to make, determine beforehand
the result of such complex motions as nature in endless
variety exhibits ; nor, again, can we with any accuracy
appreciate the relation between action and reaction by
opposing our muscular organs to one another. We must
wait long upon experience that comes to us, or rather, in
face of the objective complexity presented by nature, sally
forth to make varied experiments with moving things, and
thereupon generalise, before anything can be determined
AXIOM. 131
positively respecting motion. This is precisely what in-
quirers, until about the time of Galileo, were by no means
content to do, and they had accordingly laws of motion
which were, indeed, devised a priori, but which were not
objectively true. Since the time of Galileo true, or at least
effective, laws of motion have been established inductively,
like all other physical laws ; only it is more easy than in the
case of the others, which are less simple, to come near to an
adequate subjective construction of them, and hence the
claim sometimes set up for them to be in fact a priori and
in the full sense axiomatic.
It remains to inquire in what sense the general principles
of all knowledge or principles of certitude may be called, as
they often are called, axioms. The laws of Contradiction and
of Excluded Middle, noted though not named by Aristotle,
together with that formulated as the law of Identity, pre-
supposed as they are in all consistent thinking, have, with a
character of widest generality, also a character of extreme
simplicity, and may fitly be denominated axioms in the sense
of immediate principles. They stand, however, as pure
logical principles, apart from all others, being wholly formal,
without a shade of material content. There can be no
question, therefore, of their certainty being guaranteed by a
direct intuition, valid for all cases because fully representa-
tive of all ; as little does there appear valid ground for
calling them, in the proper sense, inductive generalisations
from experience. They may rather be held to admit only of
the kind of proof that Aristotle calls dialectical : whoever
denies them will find that he cannot argue at all or be
argued with ; he cuts himself off from all part in rational
discourse, and is no better, as Aristotle forcibly expresses it,
than a plant. The like position of being postulated as the
condition of making progress belongs to the very different
principle or principles (which may, however, be called logical,
in the wider sense) implied in the establishment of truth of
fact, more particularly the inductive investigation of nature.
Whether expressed in the form of a principle of Sufficient
Eeason, as by Leibniz, or, as is now more common, in the
form of a principle of Uniformity of Nature, with or without
a pendant principle of Causality for the special class of
132 AXIOM.
uniformities of succession, some assumption is indispensable
for knitting together into general truths the discrete and
particular elements of experience. Such postulates must be
declared to have an experiential origin rather than to be
a priori principles, but experience may more truly be said to
suggest them than to be their ground or foundation, since
they are themselves the ground, express or implied, of all
ordered experience. Their case is perhaps best met by
pronouncing them hypothetical principles, and as there are
no axioms — not even those of mathematics — that are thought
of without reference to their proved efficiency as principles
leading to definite conclusions, they may be called axiomatic
on account of their extreme generality, however little they
possess the character of immediacy.
The name axiom, at the end of the inquiry, is thus left
undeniably equivocal, and it clearly behoves those who
employ it, whether in philosophy or science, always to make
plain in what sense it is meant to be taken. Before closing,
it is, perhaps, necessary to add why, in dealing with the
question of origin, no account has been taken of the
doctrine of evolution which has become so prominent in the
latest scientific and philosophical speculation. From the
point of view of the present article, that doctrine has only
an indirect bearing on the inquiry. If the conditions of
experience as they are found in the individual suffice to
explain the different assurance with which general assertions
are made in different departments of knowledge, there is no
need to carry the psychological consideration farther back.
The effect of such difference in the conditions of experience
may, of course, be accumulated in the life of the race, and
the accumulation may go far to determine the psychological
history of the individual, but the question, as a rational one,
must be decided upon analysis of the conditions as they are.
SENSE OF DOUBLENESS WITH CEOSSED
FINGEES.1
THE familiar psychological experiment known to every school-
boy, and noted already by Aristotle in the Metaphysica (p.
1011, a 33), has often in late years been made the subject
of explanation in physiological books, though with little
success, as far as I have seen ; the explanation consisting
generally in a laboured re-statement of the difficulty. What
seems to me the true explanation suggested itself once when
I tried the experiment, determined carefully to mark the
precise phenomenon. Crossing the second finger backwards
over the forefinger of the left hand held vertically with
thumb uppermost, so that the under-side of the second finger
(usually in contact with the third finger) rested on the upper-
side of the forefinger (side next to thumb), I placed a pen-
holder between them, bringing it first into contact with the
second finger only. Causing it then to touch the forefinger
also, I was struck by perceiving this second contact coming
in, as it were, higher up in space, though the forefinger was
then lower down. So when the forefinger was first touched,
the contact with the second finger was felt as coming in lower
down, though the second finger stood then higher up. The
spatial reference is still more distinct when the eyes are shut
and the judgment is guided by the character of the touches
alone; but the most decisive form of experiment is with other
people's fingers, their eyes being shut and the question being
simply put : Does the second contact seem to you to come
in higher up or lower down in space than the first ? The
report is always the same ; and the interpretation is obvious.
W7e perceive the contacts as double because we refer them to
two distinct parts of space. The upper-side of the forefinger
and the under-side of the second finger (sides understood as
1 Mind, i. 145.
134 SENSE OF DOUBLENESS WITH CROSSED FINGERS.
above) are to us distinct parts of space, because normally
these two surfaces are not in contact with one another ; and
they cannot normally be touched simultaneously except by
objects which are, or are held to be, two (supposing, that is,
bare contact only). Contrariwise, the under-side of the fore-
finger and the upper-side of the second, being normally in
contact with one another, mean to us one and the same
space, so that when they are held apart by aught inter-
vening, the suggestion is of a thing filling one and the same
space, in other words, a single thing. It is here implied that
every part of the tactile surface has a definite spatial charac-
ter of its own, and about this as a fact there can be no ques-
tion, whatever difference of opinion there be as to whether
such character is original or derivative.
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETKY. (I.)1
THE Syllabus of Plane Geometry (Macmillan and Co., 1875)
newly issued, after much deliberation, by the Association for
the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching, includes an
introductory section which sets forth the logical interdepend-
ence of certain associated theorems. In particular, four
typical forms of theorem are given as standing in various
important relations to one another : —
If A is B, then C is D (1)
If C is not D, then A is not B (2)
If C is D, then A is B (3)
If A is not B, then C is not D (4)
(1) and (2) are said to be contrapositive each of the other ; (3)
is called the converse, and (4) the obverse, of (1). Now, says the
Syllabus, while (2) may be always got from (1) by logical
inference, it is not so with (3) or (4) ; each of those by itself
requires a geometrical proof independent of the proof of the
original theorem ; but yet both do not require to be inde-
pendently proved, because they are themselves in turn (logic-
ally) contrapositive each of the other. It will therefore ' ' never
be necessary to demonstrate geometrically more than two
of the four theorems, care being taken that the two selected
are not contrapositive each of the other ".
This view of the relations of the four propositions is not
new, even in England, being found in more than one recent
work. The Syllabus, however, makes an important advance
in nomenclature. Hitherto theorem (4) has been designated
by the name of opposite, used in such glaring inconsistency
with the tradition of logical science and with common
understanding — opposites plainly being propositions that
cannot both be true — that it is difficult to see how the
confusion could ever have been tolerated. The word obverse,
now beginning to be employed in formal logic for what used
1 Mind, i. 147.
136 LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (l.)
to be called the equipollent proposition — a logical form that
has a relation to (4) analogous to that borne by the pure
logical converse to (3) — was suggested to the Association as
a substitute for the so-called opposite, and being frankly
accepted, will now, it is to be hoped, for ever displace that
unfortunate misnomer.
So far well, but the logician's interest in the scheme does
not end with this rectification. Is it open to the geometer to
appropriate the words converse and obverse, and use them in
a sense which, if it is not inconsistent with, is at least dif-
ferent from, their original logical application? The words
so aptly express the propositions which the geometer has in
view, being those which in his (relatively) material science
correspond to the converse and obverse of pure formal logic,
that he may very fairly appropriate them. At the same time
the logician may still more fairly claim that his own original
use of the words shall not be put out of view, seeing it is
implied (as, from the fundamental character of logical science,
it cannot but be implied) in the usage of the geometer. The
pure logical converse of (1) is "In at least some case where
C is D, A is B," or " If C is D, A may be B," and this is
implied by the geometer in saying that his converse, " If C is
D, A is B " (amounting to the logician's inadmissible simple
converse of a universal affirmative proposition) needs by
itself a geometrical proof. So the pure logical obverse of
(1) is " If A is B, C is not other than D," and this is implied
by the geometer in saying that his obverse, " If A is not B,
C is not D," also by itself needs to be proved geometrically.
Nor, if the geometer should deny that he does imply logical
forms of which he may be ignorant, is the denial of any
avail when he accepts (2) under the name of contrapositive,
and thus expressly accords a place within his science to a pro-
cess (contraposition) which is not only purely formal, but is,
in fact, logical conversion applied in a special manner. The
question of real importance, then, is the practical one, how
the reference to logical principles may most effectively be
made. The mode of reference adopted in the Syllabus can-
not be pronounced in all respects satisfactory.
The scheme of the four associated theorems, though it
has a certain symmetry, is open to objection in that it
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (l.) 137
mixes up logical and extralogical relations. The relation of
(3) to (1), or of (4) to (1), is extralogical, while the relation
of (2) to (1) is purely logical. Would it not be simpler and
better to take account only of the " converse " and "obverse"
in relation to (1), and say that either of these two, by itself,
needs to be demonstrated geometrically after (1), but both
need not, because logic starting with either will give the
other ? Of course logic will yield a contrapositive of (1), but
why particularise this as (2), when it may be assumed along
with still other strictly logical transformations ? In the way
here suggested, a beginner would, at all events, get a dis-
tincter notion of the difference between logic and geometry ;
and if the plan involved the necessity of somewhat more
expressly stating what is the true nature of such a logical
process as contraposition, so much the better. There is
some confusion in the Syllabus on this head.
Thus theorem (2) may unquestionably be obtained from
(1) by the strict logical process of contraposition, and would
now be called by most logicians its contrapositive (though,
by the way, it is a negative, not a positive, proposition) ; but
(1), although in turn it follows logically from (2), cannot be
won back by contraposition, any more than a universal affirma-
tive when converted logically into a particular affirmative can
be restored, by a second conversion, to its original universal
form. The process called contraposition, in all cases where
it is applicable, consists of two stages — obversion and con-
version. For example, the simple categorical proposition,
" All S is P," becomes when obverted, " No S is not-P," and
this last, being further converted, becomes " No not-P is S,"
the contrapositive, as it is called, of the original proposition.
Now, obviously, this contrapositive cannot be made to yield
the original "All Sis P" by further contraposition (obversion
and conversion), for "No not-P is S," being obverted, becomes
the affirmative " All not-P is not-S," and this, being con-
verted, gives " Some not-S is not P," quite a different proposi-
tion from the original one. To get "All S is P" back
again we must proceed, not by obversion and conversion,
which together in this order and only in this order make
contraposition, but by conversion first and then obversion
— an order of procedure perfectly valid in logic, but unpro-
138 LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (l.)
vided with a special name. Applying this to the case in hand,
as (1) cannot be called the contrapositive of (2), so neither
can (3) and (4) be called contrapositives of one another : if
(4) is the contrapositive of (3), (3) cannot be the contraposi-
tive of (4).
Let it not be said that the point here insisted on is a
trivial one — that it is a mere question of naming. If it is
important for learners to distinguish between a geometrical
process and one purely logical, as the placing of this
" Logical Introduction " at the head of the Syllabus implies
that it is, there can be no controversy as to the necessity
of exactly determining the character of the logical process.
To call (1) and (2), or (3) and (4), contrapositives of one
another, tells the geometrical learner little more than that
there is a process called contraposition, which, if applied,
will often save him much trouble. As long as he works
with simple typical instances of theorems like (1) and
(2), it is easy for him to see that the logical equivalence, by
whatever name it is called, must hold in both directions, if
it is asserted in one ; but, when he comes to deal with actual
geometrical propositions, even not very complex ones, he will
find it difficult to assign the correct contrapositive, unless he
is told definitely by what fixed line of logical transforma-
tion it may always be reached. In default of special instruc-
tion, he will hardly be able to draw from the examples of
contraposition signalised throughout the Syllabus a consistent
notion of the process. At the best, these examples need a good
deal of transformation, verbal if not logical, before they
could be seen by a young student to correspond with the
typical theorems which are all he has to guide him. One
example, on page 16, illustrates the graver confusion, or
rather the positive error of reckoning as contrapositive the
passage from (2) to (1). It is there said that Theorem 24,
"Straight lines that are parallel to the same straight line are
parallel to one another," is the contrapositive of Axiom 5 (p.
15)—" Two straight lines that intersect one another cannot
both be parallel to the same straight line". In truth the
theorem follows almost directly from the axiom, which is a
universal negative proposition, by the process of simple (logi-
cal) conversion : there is further necessary a change in the
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (l.) 139
expression amounting to (formal) obversion, but the first was
the really critical step. Here, then, it is not logical contraposi-
tion, but logical conversion, which it concerns the geometrical
student to understand, not to say again that contraposition
always involves formal conversion. In short, it is impossible
to frame any notion of the process of contraposition 'which
shall apply, as is required in the Syllabus, equally to affirma-
tive and negative propositions, unless it is taken to mean
simply the establishment of logical equivalence ; and even
then it would still be necessary, before making any use of
the process, to determine in what different ways equivalence
may be secured. We are thus inevitably brought back to
the assumption of more than one process, however called.
The conclusion, then, to which I venture to come is that,
unless logical principles are set forth more explicitly than
in the Syllabus and other recent geometrical books, the
reference to them is little likely to be of practical service to
beginners. One thing is certain, that, if logical principles
were familiar to the geometrical beginner, he would both
learn geometry better and at the same time, in the process,
singularly strengthen his grasp of logical principles. The
notion will be scouted that a boy should be expected to have
learned logic before beginning geometry, and I by no means
argue that he should ; but I would yet maintain that
nothing could be easier than to give boys along with instruc-
tion in grammar all the knowledge of logical principles that is
necessary as a preparation for their instruction in geometry.
For this, doubtless, it would be necessary that teachers of
grammar should have learned logic, but that is not a very
extravagant requirement.
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETKY. (II.)1
DR. HIRST, on re.tiring lately from the presidency of the
Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching,
has taken notice of some observations made by me, in the
first number of this journal, with reference to the Logical
Introduction to the Syllabus of Plane Geometry issued by the
Association in 1875. As it is very important that logical
theorists on the one hand and scientific workers or teachers
on the other should lose no opportunity of mutual under-
standing, Dr. Hirst's remarks are (with his permission) here
reproduced from the Association's Report for this year (1878),
and some words of explanation are appended in reply. Dr.
Hirst says : —
" The Editor of Mind, after drawing attention to the
diversity of meaning attached by geometers on the one hand,
and pure logicians on the other, to the words ' converse ' and
' obverse,' concedes that these terms are so appropriate for
his purpose that the geometer is fairly entitled to appropriate
them in his own sense. Immediately afterwards, however,
he protests against what he considers to be an error on our
part, but what in reality is no error at all, but a necessary sequel
of the concession he has just made. With regard to the
two propositions which stand first in our Logical Introduc-
tion— the typical forms of which, if you remember, are —
(1) If A be B, then C is D,
(2) If C be not D, then A is not B,
he deems it inaccurate to say, as we do, that they are
contrapositive each of the other. He admits that the second
is contrapositive to the first, but denies that the first is
contrapositive to the second, and this because the process of
contraposition is, to him, ob version followed by conversion,
and not conversion followed by obversion. He overlooks
the fact, however, that these processes of obversion and
1 Mind, iii. 564.
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (II.) 141
conversion, as understood by the geometer, may be applied
in either one or the other order, successively, without at all
altering the final result ; so that if once the propriety of
terming the second of these propositions the contrapositive
of the first be conceded, it can no longer be contested that
the first must also be termed, by the geometer, the contra-
positive of the second. Of course, it is admitted, on both
hands, that these two propositions are logically equivalent,
and therefore it might, at first sight, appear that the question
at issue is merely one of terminology. This is, however, by
no means the case. In fact, the writer himself admits that
' this is no mere question of naming,' and he justly observes
that ' if it is important for learners to distinguish between a
geometrical process and one purely logical, as the placing of
this Logical Introduction at the head of the Syllabus implies
that it is, there can be no controversy as to the necessity of
exactly determining the character of the logical processes,
involved'. On this point I can only say that it was un-
questionably our intention that the teacher should supply
the determination here desiderated. It was not thought
consistent with our purpose, however, to introduce these
explanations into the Syllabus, and I, for my part, regret
that such was the case, since our omission has led to mis-
apprehensions of a still graver character than the one I have
now alluded to. I was hardly prepared to find that, ' in
default of special instructions,' even an accomplished logician
finds himself unable ' to draw from the examples of con-
traposition signalised throughout the Syllabus, a consistent
notion of the process,' and I was still less prepared for the
authoritative declaration that ' it is impossible to frame any
notion of the process of contraposition which shall apply, as
required in the Syllabus, equally to affirmative and negative
propositions '. Let us see if the geometer's notion of con-
traposition— for a notion he certainly has — is really so
restricted. He first of all distinguishes carefully between
the two parts or statements involved in every theorem ; the
truth of one of these — the predicate — is asserted to be a
consequence of the truth of the other — the hypothesis.
Now to each of these two statements, no matter whether it
be of an affirmative or negative character, there is a distinct
142 LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (II.)
opposite, by which I mean a statement which directly
contradicts the original. This granted, the process of con-
traposition may be said to consist, simply, in the formation
of a new theorem whose hypothesis shall be the opposite of
the predicate of the original, and whose predicate shall be
the opposite of the former hypothesis. From this it will be
seen that the process is not affected in the least by the
affirmative or negative character of either the hypothesis
or .predicate. It is further obvious that the process of
contraposition, thus denned, is a composite one. It consists,
in fact, of the interchange of hypothesis and predicate, which
is 'conversion, accompanied by the denial of hypothesis and
predicate, which in itself constitutes obversion. And it is
moreover evident, lastly, from what has been explained,
that it is a matter of perfect indifference which of the two
last-named successive processes we first apply ; so that if of
two theorems one is the contrapositive of the other, then
from our point of view, necessarily, the -first is also the con-
trapositive of the second ; in other words, the relation we
characterise by the term contrapositive is a perfectly re-
ciprocal one."
Thus far Dr. Hirst. In reply, I may perhaps be allowed
to remind those who take an interest in this subject that the
point of my observations was to urge the advantage and
even necessity of extending the reference so laudably made
in the Syllabus to the processes of logical transformation of
propositions. The occasion was of this kind. While some
steps are marked off in the Syllabus as purely logical and are
called by their recognised names, certain other processes of
an extralogical character are called by the name of the
logical processes to whose type they may be said to approach.
Thus the purely logical process in passing from (1) to (2)
above is called, as logicians now call it, Contraposition, but
the logicians' word Conversion is employed to mark such a
step as that from If A is B, 0 is D to If C is D, A is B, which
is not good in logic. Now, as explained in my original Note
and here repeated by Dr. Hirst, I did not complain of this ;
and indeed it was I that recommended to the Association the
use of the logical word ' obverse ' (for what in the previous
modern books was very perversely called ' opposite ') in a
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (ll.) 143
like transitive application. But then it clearly becomes very
important that there should be no confusion between the
original and derived use of the words, and I did not see how
this could be avoided except by a more explicit statement of
the fundamental logical processes than the Syllabus offered.
How real the danger is, Dr. Hirst must pardon me for
thinking that his own remarks now show. When I say
that Contraposition involves first Obversion and then Con-
version, he, having occasion to use these latter words, as a
geometer, in the extralogical sense, supposes that I must
mean them thus here, and blames me for not seeing that the
geometer may apply the processes indifferently in any order.
But if Contraposition is, as all allow, itself a purely logical
transformation, there can be no question of resolving it into
anything but logical Obversion and Conversion ; nor can the
fact that the geometer may equally well begin with either of
his steps first, in any way affect my logical statement. I
deny, of course, that the logical process of Contraposition
consists of the two extralogical processes in any order. If
(1) is ' obverted ' into If A is not £, C is not D, no doubt this
being logically converted becomes (2) ; but, as is very properly
remarked in the Syllabus, the first step is not warranted in
logic, and it surely cannot be assumed in order to arrive at
the legitimate contrapositive. If, on the other hand, we
begin by ' converting ' (1) into // C is D, A is B, here no
doubt, with the help of the original proposition, we are entitled
to pass to the so-called ' obverse ' If C is not D, A is not B,
but the extralogical ' conversion ' was illogical. Either way,
then, it is no true account of Contraposition to say that
it consists of Obversion and Conversion in the extralogical
sense given to them by the geometer. Contraposition can
be understood as involving Obversion and Conversion only
in the strict logical sense ; and in this sense the question of
order is not indifferent. You can get (2) from (1) logically
only by Obversion followed by Conversion ; you can get (1)
from (2) logically only by Conversion followed by Obversion.
If in either case the order of procedure is reversed, the result
would be quite different. Now, if there happen to be reasons
for calling by the name of Contraposition that order of
procedure in which Obversion is taken first, the name cannot
144 LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (ll.)
without confusion be applied to the reverse order which
yields a quite different result ; and this is what I maintained
when I denied that the passage back from (2) to (1) is
properly to be described as Contraposition, and declared it
impossible to frame any notion of the process that shall
apply equally to affirmative and negative propositions. Dr.
Hirst, indeed, gives us, in other language, a view of Contra-
position that seems to apply generally ; but, however it may
meet the practical requirements of the geometer, it only
discloses anew the logical difficulty. When he divides a
theorem into the two parts which geometers (again making
perverse use of logical language) call hypothesis and predicate,
and tells us to substitute the ' opposite ' of each for the other
in Contraposition, how is it known that this is an admissible
substitution? The geometer will not be able to reply with-
out entering into precisely those elementary logical con-
siderations which it was my plea to have explicitly set out
at the beginning of a geometrical course.
The particular point at issue— whether the passage from
(2) to (1) above may equally well with the passage from (1)
to (2) be described as Contraposition — is settled for the
logician (to whom the question belongs) by a reference to the
origin of the process so named. Contraposition arose out of
Conversion. While the typical propositions A, E, I might all
be converted in one way or another, the particular negative 0
— Some S is not P — proved inconvertible. Was there then no
way of making the subject S stand as predicate ? Yes : by
obverting the proposition into what used to be called its ' equi-
pollent ' Some S is not-P, this could be converted (as /) into
Some not-P is S ; and the process was called Conversion by
Negation or Contraposition, also in course of time simply
Contraposition. No sooner, however, was it recognised,
than the question must arise whether it was applicable
to 0 only. It could not, indeed, be applied to /, because
/ being obverted into O could not then be converted ; but
it could be applied to A and E. Only, whereas in Con-
version A suffered (being degraded from All S is P into Some
P is S) but E retained its universality (No S is P becoming
No P is S), — in Contraposition, on the other hand, while A
retained its universality (All S is P becoming No not-P is S),
LOGIC AND THE ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY. (ll.) 145
E suffered (being degraded from No S is P into Some not-P is S).
Now, upon this showing, it is quite clear, as I argued origin-
ally, that theorem (2) above, corresponding as it does with
the categorical E, cannot by this way of Contraposition be
brought to (1). It can be brought to (1) only by being first
converted and then obverted — a perfectly valid logical trans-
formation, but not Contraposition. When contraposed, (2)
becomes the very different proposition In some case when A is
not B, G is not D. In short, (1) and (2) cannot be called
mutually contrapositive except by a new definition of Con-
traposition, which shall make it cover Obverted Conversion
as well as Converted Obversion. Is such a definition
possible? Of course, it is possible — at the expense of
logical usage : when I declared it impossible, it was on the
supposition that logical usage should be maintained. Is it
advisable as well as possible — advisable, that is to say, for the
practical purposes of the geometer ? I care not even if this
should be asserted, because I am sure that the definition
cannot be satisfactorily given except as based upon such an
explicit reference to the fundamental processes as would
satisfy any logician — when the whole business, indeed, be-
comes " a mere question of naming ".
I end with one more remark, already thrown out in
Mind, No. -3, p. 425> but which, in view'of these misunder-
standings, I would now accentuate. It is that geometers
should abandon the use of the logical terms converse and obverse
for extralogical relations. The terms inverse and reciprocal,
used by M. Delboeuf in his Prolegomenes philosophiques de la
Geometric (Liege, 1860), p. 88, are equally significant, while
they lead to no confusion with the purely logical processes
that should be familiar to every scientific reasoner — Obver-
sion and Conversion as well as Contraposition.
10
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.1
MB. JEVONS'S work, The Principles of Science,2 since its
appearance more than two years ago, has not received
anything like the amount of attention it deserves. That
such a book should have remained so long unnoticed by
the greater reviews that could devote sufficient space to
the critical appreciation of its contents, is indeed a signal
proof of the need for a special philosophical journal. An
attempt will be made in these pages to examine it with
due care. It is a work of much excellence, yet also, as it
seems to the present writer, open to exception in many ways.
Mr. Jevons begins by expounding a theory of Formal
Logic, deductive and inductive. Upon this basis he pro-
ceeds to explain the science of Quantity, especially Number,
as an outgrowth from pure logic, and in the same relation
deals particularly with the theory of Probability, of which
he finds the scientific — or, as he commonly calls it, the
inductive — investigation of Nature to be a mere applica-
tion. He next turns aside to set forth the various Methods
of Measurement employed in quantitative research. Then
follows in full detail his doctrine of Inductive Investigation,
with a subsidiary treatment of Generalisation, Analogy, &c.,
and a preliminary handling of Classification, to be carried
out in a future work. Meanwhile the present work reaches
its term with some general reflexions on the results and
limits of Scientific Method.
The Methods, rather than the Principles, of Science
would perhaps be a more appropriate title for the book as
it stands. Systematic investigation of principles in any
philosophical sense of the word there is none. On the
other hand, the exposition of methods employed in the
1 Mind, i. 206.
2 The Principle* of Science : A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method,
by W. STANLEY JEVONS, M.A., F.E.S. 2 vols. 1874. Macmillan & Co.
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 147
actual investigation of nature is most elaborate and alto-
gether admirable. No such exposition existed before ; and,
as far as the present writer can judge or can learn from the
judgment of competent authorities, the accuracy of Mr.
Jevons's acquaintance with the most varied departments of
science is singularly great. As a methodologist he has fairly
outstripped predecessors as great as Herschel, Whewell and
Mill.
If the book really corresponded to its title, Mr. Jevons
could hardly have passed so lightly over the question, which
he does not omit to raise, concerning those undoubted
principles of knowledge commonly called the Laws of
Thought. The question is whether these are subjective
or objective, and Mr. Jevons is of opinion — an opinion in
which he does not stand alone — that they are at once sub-
jective and objective. One wishes, however, that he had given
some reasons for his view, and not, in a book dealing ex-
pressly with the Principles of Science, contented himself
with the bare statement that he is "inclined to regard
them as true both in the nature of thought and things "
(i. p. 9). Everywhere, indeed, he appears least at ease
when he touches on questions properly philosophical ; nor
is he satisfactory in his psychological references, as on pp.
4, 5, where he cannot commit himself to a statement
without an accompaniment of "probably," "almost," or
"hardly". Eeservations are often very much in place, but
there are fundamental questions on which it is proper to
make up one's mind. Judged by his book, Mr. Jevons
does not equal either Whewell or Mill in philosophical
grasp.
The present article will treat only of the first part of the
work, l in which the author following in the track of recent
logicians seeks to recast the traditional doctrine of Formal
Logic, by propounding a new principle of reasoning and, in
furtherance of its application, devising an appropriate
system of symbolic expression for logical propositions.
Since the doctrine of the Quantification of the Predicate
JEven this to the exclusion of the last chapter in it, dealing with
formal Induction, which will best be considered in connexion with Mr.
Jevons's general doctrine of inductive inference.
148 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
was first enunciated in this country by Mr. George Ben-
tham in 1827, and brought into vogue later by Hamilton,
various attempts have been made to set aside the older
doctrine of proposition and inference which originated with
Aristotle ; and of late years no one has laboured so per-
sistently at the double work of demolition and reconstruc-
tion as Mr. Jevons. In two previous essays, Pure Logic
(1864), and Substitution of Similars (1869), also in a variety
of special papers, he has felt his way towards the doctrine
which he now propounds in a form that, if not final, yet
appears to him sufficiently developed to supersede at once
all other modern doctrines and that ancient one against
which they were levelled. It is advanced as embodying
all the anti- Aristotelian import of the newer theories ; at
the same time, as systematised or organised beyond any
of them ; and yet withal as perfectly simple in principle
and details when compared with the greatest among them
—the very complex and long-drawn system of the late
Prof. Boole. Nor does Mr. Jevons at all exaggerate the
merits of his doctrine in relation to his compeers. He
is superior to Boole not only in the simplicity and direct-
ness of his logical processes but ajso in his conception
of the relation of logic to mathematics. His own doctrine
of Number is not in all respects satisfactory, as may on
another occasion be shown, but his arguments (pp. 173, 4,
et alib,} against Boole's notion of logic as a special kind of
algebra, are excellent and decisive. We may proceed then
to consider Mr. Jevons's doctrine as the best outcome of
the modern revolt against the Aristotelian system, sure
that nothing has been urged in opposition more strongly
than he urges it.
Mr. Jevons's Introduction may be described as a summary
plea for a statement of the reasoning process which shall be
strictly universal and not, " like the ancient syllogism,"
cover "but a small and not even the most important part"
of the whole extent of logical arguments. The universal
principle (of "Substitution") suggested is in these words:
" So far as there exists sameness, identity or likeness, what
is true of one thing will be true of the other ". Here there
is evidently implied an expression of logical propositions in
JEVONS'S FOEMAL LOGIC. 149
the form of equations, and accordingly a general justifica-
tion is offered for such a mode of expression, while an
appropriate system of symbols is indicated. A chapter on
Terms is then placed first according to the usage of logicians,
and Mr. Jevons has both amendments and advances to pro-
pose upon the common doctrine, besides fixing more exactly
the nature and conditions of his symbolical expression of
the terminal elements of propositions. The next chapter
deals with Propositions themselves, and contains all the
express arguments the author has to offer for putting them
into the equational form. He is now in a position to treat
of Direct Deduction, which consists in an application of
his principle of Substitution to the terms of (equational)
propositions under the first law of thought (Identity), and
here he seeks to show how small a part of all deductive
reasoning is represented by the forms of Syllogism, also
how imperfect is the representation. There remains the
process of Indirect Deduction, consisting in the practice
of Substitution under the laws of Contradiction and Ex-
cluded Middle (Duality) as well as Identity ; this has
however to be prefaced by a consideration of Disjunctive
Propositions, since the alternative relation (either-or) is
employed in the expression of any logical notion in terms
of another according to the law of Duality. The Indirect
Method of Inference is introduced at first as a merely sup-
plementary process, to be resorted to as the means of prov-
ing that a thing cannot be anything else than a particular
thing when it cannot be directly proved to be that thing ; but
it shows itself so powerful that it ends by swallowing up
Direct Deduction and remaining alone in the field as the
truly universal process of reasoning. It proves to be able
to furnish a complete solution of the universal problem :
Given any number of logical premisses or conditions, re-
quired the description of any class of objects or any term
as governed by those conditions ; and being a process that
follows a fixed unalterable course in all cases, it can be
shortened and facilitated by a number of contrivances, on
which Mr. Jevons has spent much inventive power. The
most remarkable is his famous logical machine, which in
a most ingenious fashion does unerringly perform the work
150 JEVONS'S FOEMAL LOGIC.
of pure logical combination, the mind by a conscious process
having first brought the premisses given into a definite
symbolic form and again at the close having to interpret
the results mechanically attained.
There is some difficulty in assigning the precise ictte-mbre
of the system. Mr. Jevons does not say whether reasoning
is what he describes it — a process of substitution — because
propositions ultimately understood are equations, or whether
it is the substitutive character of reasoning that necessitates
the adoption in logic of the equational form. On the whole
the latter seems to be his view, since he allows that proposi-
tions may be expressed otherwise ; but in any case the two
positions are involved with each other in his mind, and it is
evident from the beginning that it will be a main part of his
task to develop a doctrine of Proposition suited to the prin-
ciple of Substitution. Hence the rough outline of such a
doctrine advanced in the Introduction ; where he maintains
that the analogy between the relation of subject and pre-
dicate in logical propositions and the relation of the two
terms in mathematical equations justifies the use of the
mathematical sign = for the logical copula. At this stage
he does not urge that the sign ought always to be so
employed, for he even speaks (p. 20) of equality as but
one of many relations that may subsist between logical
terms, and from this point of view gives to the general
formula of logical inference the new expression : "In what-
ever relation a thing stands to a second thing, in the same
relation it stands to the like or equivalent of that second
thing". Here also, however, one equation is presumed before
the reasoning, as understood by Mr. Jevons, can proceed,
and the critical question remains how to determine equival-
ence in logical propositions generally. That it can be done
is clear to Mr. Jevons, when he asserts shortly afterwards
(p. 29) that " every proposition expresses the resemblance
or difference of the things denoted by its terms " ; but this
of course is the very point to be proved, and the mere asser-
tion decides nothing.
The chapter on Terms may be lightly passed over. Mr.
Jevons, in as far as he adopts the common distinctions
(general-singular, abstract-concrete, collective- distributive
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 151
and the like) does not add anything of importance to the
determination of their character, while some of his state-
ments are decidedly loose. In particular he confuses the
singular and the proper name when he charges logicians
with erroneously asserting that singular terms are devoid
of meaning in intension: Mill, whom he points at, never
says any such thing of singulars — says of many singulars
quite the reverse — and in denying connotation to proper
names is surely correct. Mr. Jevons himself would set up
a new class of terms under the name substantial, which he
finds, oddly enough, to partake of the nature both of
abstracts and concretes. Gold, for instance, is a concrete
substance, yet it has a uniformity or unity of structure —
being gold with all its qualities in every part of it — which
allies it with abstracts like redness ; for redness, according
to Mr. Jevons (p. 34), " so far as it is redness merely, is
one and the same everywhere, and possesses absolute one-
ness or unity ". Logicians, he complains, have taken very
little notice of such terms. But why should they take any
notice of a distinction that is wholly material or extra-
logical ? Gold is a concrete, so is water and so is lion.
What matters it to the logician that you always break up
gold, being an elementary substance, into parts of identical
character, but not always water, because water is a com-
pound, and never lion, because lion is an organism ? If
Mr. Jevons will embark upon such distinctions, he will not
soon come to the end of them. This one, too, is not happily
named. Are not lion and water also substantial? The
fault extends to Mr. Jevons's account of collective terms,
as the reader may see on p. 35. What remains of the
chapter has its importance in relation to the symbolic
expression of terms in propositions, and to the central
doctrine of Proposition let us pass.
It is now Mr. Jevons's express object to show that all
forms of proposition " admit the application of the one
same principle of inference that what is true of one thing
or circumstance is true of the like or same" (p. 43), and
this, we understand, amounts with him to proving that all
propositions may be expressed as equations. Propositions,
he begins by saying, may assert an identity of time, space,
152 JEVONS'S FOEMAL LOGIC.
manner, degree or any other circumstance in which things
may agree or differ, and in support he cites a number of
instances where the notion of sameness or equality is ex-
pressed or more or less distinctly implied in the predicate.
No doubt, there is a sense in which such propositions assert
identity, but they make nothing for the general thesis that
identity of some kind is what all propositions express.
Proceeding however to maintain the thesis in regard to all
propositions involving ''notions of quality" (which is as
much as to say all logical propositions whatever),1 he finds
at once that "the most important class" consists of asser-
tions which may be called " Simple Identities," represented
by the formula A = B. Let us look at these more closely.
As illustrations of Simple Identities, Mr. Jevons adduces
two cases of similar sensible qualities, one or two cases of
verbal synonyms, some cases of propositions with singular
names as subjects, some cases of definitions, one case of a
number of objects brought together into a collective expres-
sion, some geometrical equations (e.g., Equilateral triangles
= Equiangular triangles), and some expressions concerning
uniform and exclusive co-existence of qualities (e.y., Crys-
tals of cubical system = Crystals incapable of double refrac-
tion). He mixes all these up together as if they were of
equal importance logically ; but, while some of them are
irrelevant, being propositions of the kind noted before in
which the identity or similarity asserted is really part of the
predicate, others, it is plain, are propositions only by cour-
tesy, being either of no logical importance, because they are
assertions about mere names or about singular things under
proper (meaningless) names, or logically important as de-
finitions not as propositions. In short, none of the illustra-
tions are of any real account for Mr. Jevons's argument
except those falling under the last two heads of the fore-
1 Mr. Jevons speaks here (p. 44) of " confining attention " to the pro-
positions thus described, and leaving over propositions concerned with
number and magnitude. In fact he leaves none over, for propositions
about quantity, which are those he has in view, do in respect of logical
form involve what he calls " notions of quality " as much as any others
(else, how should logic be the truly fundamental science ?) ; and accord-
ingly he does not scruple (p. 46) to refer to such among others in spite of
any previous exclusion.
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 153
going list. Keal or synthetic propositions like those involved
in the equations cited or in another often mentioned by
Mr. Jevons, Exogens = Dicotyledons, are alone worthy of
consideration. Let Mr. Jevons claim all the others as
simple identities, similarities or what not as he will, and
make formal equations out of every one of them. The
question remains whether a real proposition about equila-
teral triangles or exogens can be legitimately put into the
form of an equation with the mark = for copula, or whether
equations like those quoted represent the propositions with
which logic has to deal.
In point of fact, as Mr. Jevons is forward to allow, logic
has many propositions to deal with that are anything but
Simple Identities, e.g., Mammals are vertebrates; and pro-
positions of this type, in which the subject is commonly said
to be included within the predicate, were taken by Aristotle
as fundamental. For this act and his supposed consequent
neglect of Simple Identities, the venerable father of logic
has many reproaches showered on him (pp. 46, 48, 50, &c.),
but Mr. Jevoiis should look into the Prior, to say nothing
of the Posterior, Analytics and see if Aristotle was as oblivious
as he supposes. Choosing to take his Simple Identities as
fundamental, Mr. Jevons has to bring the other class into
relation with these, and very curious it is to watch his pro-
cedure. He had pronounced Simple Identities "the most
important class," "all-important," &c., and one would ex-
pect the others to be less important. From the first, how-
ever, he is forced to call them " an almost equally important
kind" (p. 47), while later on they prove to include "the
great mass of scientific truths " and " the most common of
inductive inferences " (p. 149) : they also enter into infer-
ences "almost more frequently" than any others (p. 66).
He observes besides that "in ordinary language the verb
is or are expresses mere inclusion more often than not "
(p. 48), an assertion which, though far from correct — for
in truth the copula by itself means neither inclusion nor
identity — affords, one would think, with the other state-
ments as to the scientific importance of this class of
propositions, a very sufficient justification for Aristotle's
selection of them as fundamental. Mr. Jevons notwith-
154 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
standing will have identities made of them in subordina-
tion to his grand class (how grand we have seen !) of
Simple Identities, and asserts, like others before him, that,
though in the proposition, Mammalians are vertebrates, the
terms are not simply identical, still there is identity between
the mammalians and part of the vertebrates. Let the rela-
tion then be called a " Partial Identity". Quantifiers of the
predicate insert the word some, and Boole uses a special
symbol V, to mark the partial character of the identity :
Mr. Jevons prefers another mode of symbolism. Mamma-
lians (A) are identical with all vertebrates (B) that are
mammalians (A): hence we may write A = AB, a form,
he maintains, which at once fully expresses the whole
content of the proposition and brings it into line with the
fundamental class of Simple Identities. Add that, in order
to get uniformity of copula (to be marked by the sign of
equality), he does away with the distinction of affirmative
and negative propositions, after the manner of Hobbes and
others, by attaching the mark of negation to the predicate,
while, after De Morgan, he chooses italics for the symbolic
expression of negative terms (a for not-A), and we have
before us perhaps all that is necessary for the understanding
of Mr. Jevons's expression of propositions.1
But we have still to learn the exact meaning of such a
Simple Identity as Exogens = Dicotyledons. It means, says
Mr. Jevons on p. 19, that "the group of objects denoted by
the one term is identical with that denoted by the other in
everything except the name ". The identity, he further
remarks, " may sometimes arise from the mere imposition
of names, but it may also arise from the deepest laws of the
constitution of nature". Here and in the words which
follow on p. 20, Mr. Jevons clearly enough indicates the
difference of verbal and real propositions which in his illus-
1 He distinguishes, it is true, another " highly important class of pro-
positions " (p. 51) under the name of .Limited Identities, with the
formula AB = AC, meaning: "Within the sphere of the class of things
A, all the B's are all the C's ; " but this class we may neglect. I
remark only in passing that the example given by Mr. Jevons— Plants
that are large are the plants that are devoid of locomotive power —
though one sees how it miyht be represented by the formula, can hardly
be so represented consistently with his symbolic expression of the other
classes.
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 155
tration of Simple Identities he confuses or ignores ; but this
by the way. To return to the example, he makes still
another remark (p. 19), that it is " a logical identity express-
ing a profound truth concerning the character of vegetables ".
There is here perhaps a faint suggestion that somehow the
qualities connoted by the two terms are identical, but Mr.
Jevons's view thus far plainly is that the only identity in
the case is identity of objects denoted : the qualities connoted
by the terms are indeed expressly different. So elsewhere
(p. 58) he tells us pointedly that the equation means "that
every individual .falling under one name falls equally under
the other". He adds, it is true, an alternative reading —
" That the qualities which belong to all exogens are the
same as those which belong to all dicotyledons " — which
seems at variance with the other ; but, rightly understood
or given, it comes to the same thing. As it stands, the
reading is of course erroneous if it means, as the words
most naturally suggest, that the exogenous quality and the
dicotyledonous quality are identical, not to say that it would,
if valid, turn the proposition into one purely verbal. The
true reading, however, which Mr. Jevons must be supposed
to have in view is — that the qualities which belong to all
exogens as such and the qualities which belong to all dico-
tyledons as such are always found together in the same
objects. Thus we are brought back to identity of objects.
And it may be freely granted that, where there is such
thoroughgoing identity of the objects denoted by two names
of different connotation, the substitution of one for the
other is in this sense admissible that precisely the same
objects will always be pointed at by either. It is also, no
doubt, possible to mark this particular fact by the use of
the mathematical sign for equality.
Next as to Partial Identities. It is equally true, in the
expression Mammalians = Mammalian Vertebrates, that the
same objects are indicated or denoted by the two terms of
the equation ; and the substitution in any case of the one
for the other will always be admissible in the sense that
precisely the same objects will continue to be meant under
the more complex as under the simpler description. So far
there is no more objection to the equational form here than
156 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
before. But how then is the identity, what Mr. Jevons here
•calls it, partial / It is as complete as in the class of Simple
Identities : indeed, if it were not so, it would be impossible
to use the sign of equality or to practise that process of sub-
stitution (reasoning) for the sake of which the equational
•expression is adopted. What Mr. Jevons means by calling
it partial is of course plain enough : he is thinking of the
terms, not as they appear after manipulation in the equation,
but as they appeared in the original proposition, where the
terms are not simply interchangeable — do not indicate pre-
cisely the same objects — but are interchangeable only under
certain conditions laid down in the doctrine of logical Con-
version. In short, the equation in this case appears as a
highly artificial expression for the natural proposition —
artificial in the literal sense that work has had to be done
upon the proposition to bring it into the new form, and, if
it is called a partial. Identity, artificial also in the other sense
of being a hybrid form — neither proposition nor equation.
Mr. Jevons, it may here be added, claims as the first fruit
of his theory — that it supersedes the whole doctrine of Con-
version (p. 55) ; and we are now in a position to judge with
what reason. If you take a proposition, Mammalians are
vertebrates, and first carefully inquire what limits must be
put upon the interchange of its terms, and then express
those limits by a symbol, and finally, as you then may,
express the whole as an equation, the very meaning of
which is that it holds either way, — no doubt, you need the
doctrine of Conversion no more ; but you have assumed and
used it in the preliminary process all the same. In truth,
you have at the end not only surmounted Conversion : you
have also got rid of Subject and Predicate — which means,
if it means anything, that in attaining Equation you have
abolished Proposition. Perhaps it is well so, but at least
let it be understood, and let us talk no more in logic of
" propositions ".
Mr. Jevons, however, is perfectly aware that his expres-
sion for the common logical proposition may seem " artificial
and complicated," and he gives due notice that it is on
"general grounds" he contends for reducing every kind of
proposition to the form of an identity (p. 50). . These
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 157
grounds, in character mainly practical, we shall presently
examine, but the prior theoretic question, least thought of
by Mr. Jevons, must first be once for all considered. The
question is whether the logician, dealing with Thought,
must start from Equations of the type A = B or from Pro-
positions of the type A is B. If from Equations, they will
be of the type of Mr. Jevons's Simple Identities, because
all others, for example Partial Identities, are intelligible
only as approximations to the simple type, and, but for the
existence of the class represented by A = B, it would hardly
occur to anybody to express the proposition A is B in the
form of an equation (A = AB or otherwise). If from Pro-
positions, they will be of the common type A is B, because
no simpler conjunction of subject and predicate can be
assigned. The question then resolves itself into another :
Which of the two expressions is really the simpler and truly
represents the fundamental act of Thought ?
Mr. Jevons can only be understood as maintaining that
it is the expression A = B. This appears from the whole
course of his exposition, from his oft-repeated attacks on
Aristotle (who took precisely the opposite view), and very
expressly in a passage (p. 135) where he stigmatises as.
"the most serious error" of De Morgan's logic his holding
"that because the proposition All A's are all B's (A = B)
was but another expression for the two propositions All A's.
are B's and All B's are A's it must be a composite and not
really an elementary form of proposition ". That is to say :
the expression A = B is an elementary form of proposition
and, for the reason just stated, the elementary form. But
Mr. Jevons nowhere denies, nay himself repeatedly asserts,
that the one expression A = B may be resolved into, or, what
is the same thing, includes the two expressions A = AB (A is
B) and B = BA (B is A) ; while his ingenious logical machine
positively refuses to entertain the Simple Identity except in
this double form. How can he then deny that the proposi-
tion A is B is in the truest sense simpler and more funda-
mental than the manifestly complex expression A = B ; that
this latter is not a logical proposition at all but a shorthand
expression for two logical propositions which cannot further
be resolved ? All that he says in reply to the dumb protest.
158 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
of his machine is that he does not think the "remarkable
fact " of its taking in only the common logical proposition
does really militate against the simplicity of his equational
form A = B (p. 129). All the argument that he urges for the
simplicity of the form is given at p. 71, where he asserts it
to be more " simple and general " than either A is B or B
is A, apparently because it follows from the two taken to-
gether and contains as much information as both of them !
That seems a strange inversion of the meaning of generality
and simplicity ; and, for my part, I cannot understand how,
in point of theory, any question remains. The question of
the practical utility of equational or propositional expression
is a different one and must be separately considered ; but, in
point of theory, it surely seems final to say that, if a form
can be resolved into two other forms and each of these
cannot further be resolved either back again into the first
or into anything simpler, we have got hold of elements or
what may pass for such. The proposition A is B is such an
elementary form in logic and expresses an act of thought as
judgment than which none simpler can be assigned. The
expression A = B (all A is all B) is not elementary, because
it stands for two distinct judgments at once.
From the theoretic point of view there is, moreover,
another fundamental objection to the use in logic of the
sign for equality. The only sense in which it can be under-
stood, when applied to logical propositions, is, as we saw,
to represent identity of the objects denoted by the terms :
if understood of the attributes connoted by the terms, it
does not at all express the true import of a real (synthetic)
proposition. But it is precisely by their attributes — the
aspect which cannot be expressed in equational form — that
we think of things or bring them into logical relation, as
Mr. Jevons allows (p. 58) when he says in language of his
own (which I do not wholly adopt) that " there are many
reasons for believing that the intensive or qualitative form
of reasoning is the primary or fundamental one". I hold,
therefore, on this ground also, that the equational form is
theoretically inadmissible in logic. If, notwithstanding, Mr.
Jevons is able, as we shall see, to work out with it a con-
sistent doctrine of reasoning, this is due to the fact that
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 159
connotation and denotation stand in a definite relation ;
and the doctrine may have its practical justification. But
the theoretic difficulty remains.
We may now proceed to consider the grounds, mainly
practical, upon which Mr. Jevons himself rests the credit
of his doctrine with its equational base. General harmony,
he contends, is established among all parts of reasoning
(p. 50), and thereby a solution of the general logical pro-
blem is rendered possible (p. 105). He speaks also of
Aristotle destroying "the deep analogies which bind to-
gether logical and mathematical reasoning" (p. 48), and
by implication claims that his doctrine reveals them. This
second point may first be shortly disposed of.
Save with the practical view of securing for logic the full
use of algebraical processes, it is not clear why it should be
a special object to establish analogies between logical and
"mathematical" reasoning; for, if logic is the fundamental
science, as Mr. Jevons triumphantly argues against Boole,
there seems no meaning in seeking to do more than deter-
mine the exact logical import of mathematical, as of other
scientific processes. It is clear, however, that the supposed
practical advantage cannot be secured without subordinat-
ing logic to algebra. Now could there be a more effective
way of throwing doubt on its fundamental character than
to find that specially mathematical processes are applicable
in logic ? Even the use of the single sign for equality is
fraught with peril in this respect, more especially as upon
it depend any other "deep analogies" there may be.
Whether there be analogy or not between the sign in
mathematics and the copula in logic, the sign is a mathe-
matical one and cannot be used in logic without giving to
mathematics from which it is drawn a prerogative character.
Mr. Jevons accordingly, for all his opposition to Boole, is
not proof against the temptation to settle logical questions
off-hand upon grounds of mathematical analogy ; as where,
for example, he urges against the doctrine of logical Con-
version the usage of the mathematician who " would not
think it worth mention that if x — y then also y = x" (p. 56) ;
obviously begging the very point in question as to the iden-
tity of subject and predicate with the terms of an algebraical
160 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
equation. So much for the fundamental analogy. For the
rest let us hear Mr. Jevons himself on the other side of the
question. At p. 81, he tells us that originally he agreed
with Boole in using the sign + for the conjunction or as
marking logical alternation, but agrees no longer because the
analogy between mathematical addition and logical alterna-
tion is " of a very partial character ". Then he adds " that
there is such profound difference between a logical and a
mathematical term as should prevent our uniting them by
the same symbol". Now I do not suppose that in this
last statement, general as the wording is, Mr. Jevons is
thinking of anything but the particular symbol + which he
is anxious to extrude from logic ; but I do not see why it
does not tell with equal force against the use of the symbol
= , the true fount and origin of the evil against which he
finds it thus necessary to protest. In short, we have not yet
got from Mr. Jevons a practical, any more than a theoretic,
reason for the introduction of the fundamental symbol, and
we do find him uttering a most impressive warning against
a practical danger which it most naturally entails. The
justification of the first step we must therefore look for
elsewhere, namely, in that perfectly harmonious doctrine
of reasoning which, we are led to suppose, can thus and
not otherwise be developed.
The mode of reasoning first considered by Mr. Jevons,
Direct Deduction, consists, as before mentioned, in Substitu-
tion practised under the one law of Identity, or, in other
words, upon the premisses as given. Here, neglecting
minor matters, let us at once note the points which he
seeks to make against Syllogism, to the advantage of his
own method. The syllogistic doctrine, he says, (1) takes no
account of inferences involving Simple Identities either ex-
clusively or along with Partials, and (2), where it is applic-
able, namely to Partial Identities, it draws an incomplete
conclusion (p. 69), nay, sometimes even a dubious one (p. 72),
while it does its work always in a clumsy incomprehensive
way (p. 67), and moreover has to be supplemented by elabor-
ate rules for the avoidance of Fallacies (p. 75). These two
last heads of the second charge cannot be met without com-
paring in detail Mr. Jevons's plan for obviating the special
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 161
doctrines of Figure and Mood and of Fallacies, and I will
merely say that the attentive reader will find the simplifica-
tion much more apparent than real.1 The main charges
against Syllogism one is bound to meet. For this it is im-
portant to note what Mr. Jevons means by logical conclusion
or Inference. He finds it not easy to say, but at last (p. 137)
commits himself to the assertion that "logical change may
perhaps best be described as consisting in the determination
of a relation between certain classes of objects from a relation
between certain other classes". Now turn to the "infer-
ences" as he calls them, which he charges "the ancient
syllogistic system " with overlooking. Prominent among
them are assertions of "equivalency of words," interchange-
ability of definitions and the like (pp. 62-5). . But these are
no inferences at all, either as understood by any serious up-
holder of syllogism, or, as we have just seen, by Mr. Jevons
himself. It is true that amid such utterly trivial cases of
verbal re-expression Mr. Jevons cites some cases of true
(formal) inference from real compound assertions in the form
of equations (see in particular one at the head of p. 64), but
Aristotle, as already suggested, did by no means overlook
such, though very rightly he did not make them fundamental
in his system. As for the charge of incompleteness brought
against the common syllogistic conclusion, let it be given in
Mr. Jevons's own words: "From Sodium is a metal and
Metals conduct electricity, we inferred that Sodium = Sodium
metal conducting electricity, whereas the old logic simply
concludes that Sodium conducts electricity" (p. 69). I ask
which form of the conclusion best corresponds with Mr.
Jevons's own definition of logical change or inference.
There is some meaning in calling the common syllogistic
conclusion an inference (formal) : Mr. Jevons's so-called
conclusion is a summing-up — a compendious description.
Lastly, the still graver charge insinuated that the syllogism
reader will also find some wholly misdirected argument on p. 76,
where Mr. Jevons contests the universality of the rule that two negative
premisses yield no conclusion. The example he urges by way of excep-
tion is no exception. There are four terms in the example, and thus no
syllogism, if the premisses are taken as negative propositions ; while the
minor premiss is an affirmative proposition, if the terms are made of the
requisite number three.
11
162 JEVONS'S FOEMAL LOGIC.
sometimes yields a conclusion that is open to positive misin-
terpretation (p. 72) has only to be looked at to fall away.
From the two assertions, Potassium is a metal and Potas-
sium floats on water, the syllogistic conclusion is that Some
metal floats on water. Mr. Jevons objects that some metal
(or, as he writes it, metals) is here liable to be understood
too widely, when in fact all you can be sure of from the
premisses is that the one metal potassium floats. But he
ought to remember that some in logic means not-none and
that only. How can it then be understood here too widely ?
In what respect is the conclusion not perfectly exact ? His
own expression Potassium metal = Potassium floating on
water, if it can seriously be called a conclusion at all, is not
a whit more safe against misinterpretation. Because it does
not prove that gold will not float, anybody who cares may
stoutly maintain that gold perhaps may. Logic is not meant
nor has any power to bar out wilful irrelevancies.
So much for Direct Deduction. It is however in the In-
direct Method of Inference that Mr. Jevons's doctrine culmi-
nates, affording that solution of the general problem of logic
which is the true mark of its superiority. Unfortunately
it is just at this stage that it becomes impossible to give
in brief form a satisfactory statement of the doctrine as a
basis for criticism : Mr. Jevons himself without wasting
words takes not a few pages to expound the method fully.
The method reposes ultimately on the fact that, under the
law of Excluded Middle, anything in logic may be expressed
in terms of anything else — in the form, namely, of the dis-
junctive propositions A is either B or not-B. Conceive
then a set of premisses involving several terms (two, three,
four, &c.) : what possible alternative combinations of the
terms there are, without reference to the premisses, may
always be fixedly determined, and what particular combina-
tions are possible with reference to, or consistently with,
the premisses may then be determined by a process of
substitution followed by an application of the law of Con-
tradiction. Those to whom this statement is obscure must
go to the book itself, where they will see the whole method
not only clearly set forth and copiously illustrated, but
gradually brought into such a shape that the machine
JEVONS'S FOEMAL LOGIC. 1(53
devised by Mr. Jevons does the purely logical part of the
whole process.
It should in any case be evident why Mr. Jevons lays
particular stress upon t'he relation of Disjunction or Alter-
nation and devotes a special chapter to it, though some may
wonder why in a theory of pure logic he takes no express
account of the relation of Eeason and Consequent in
hypothetical propositions, upon which disjunctives have
hitherto generally been supposed to depend. As it stands,
the chapter on Disjunctive Propositions contains much that
is of value. Mr. Jevons argues strongly for the view main-
tained by some logicians (Whately, Maiisel, Mill, &c.),
against others (Hamilton, Boole, &c.), that either-or- does
not mean if the one. then not the other but only if not the one
then the other. Without adopting all his arguments (for here
as elsewhere he does not distinguish sufficiently between
mere verbal expression and real thought) one can agree with
his conclusion so far as to say that logical alternation does
not universally mean more than is conveyed by the second
of the two hypothetical expressions. It is not clear, how-
ever, why Mr. Jevons should argue so elaborately for his
conclusion. The alternation he has in view for the develop-
ment of logical terms under the law of Excluded Middle,
as in A is either B or not-B, is one where the alternatives
are mutually exclusive ; and in no other sense of Alternation
can he describe it (which he does at the beginning of the
chapter) as a process equal to that otherwise known as
logical Division — the inverse process to Generalisation.1
All this, however, by the way.
What, then, shall be said of the Indirect Method itself?
Undoubtedly it does accomplish all that Mr. Jevons claims
for it ; and that he has sought not without success for a
method which shall solve the problem of logic generally is
a merit of which no criticism can rob him. One may hold
the method to be artificial and demur to its theoretic base ;
nevertheless it does what it professes to do, does it more
simply and satisfactorily than previous systems (like Boole's)
1 Mr. Jevons says Abstraction (p. 79), but this must be a slip. The
inverse of Abstraction is not Division but the well-recognised process of
Determination.
164 JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC.
that made the same professions, and apparently it does what
the traditional system of logic cannot do. Whatever may
be said in favour of the bases of the traditional system, it
cannot be denied that its supporters have shown the most
persistent indisposition to develop it into an effective uni-
versal method of reasoning. It has been passed on from
century to century in a crystallised form ; it appears to
admit of no development — nay, the boast has been made
(though ignorantly) that it was completed once for all by
Aristotle ; and practical influence over reasoning, except
within a certain narrow range, it seems to have none. For
all that appears, the adherent of the old logic gets little
or no benefit from his science the moment an argument
becomes truly complex and passes beyond a small number
of rigid forms. No wonder that earnest logicians like Mr.
Jevons, anxious for a truly general theory, should be tempted
to break away from a system that has proved so barren, and
grasp at analogies that may procure for the theory of reason-
ing something of the pliability and fruitfulness belonging to
the science of mathematics. The temptation granted, it
cannot be too often repeated that Mr. Jevons has signalised
himself above other innovators in devising a system that is
practically effective without sacrificing (like Boole's) the
independence of Logic altogether.
At the same time it may well be doubted whether Mr.
Jevons would not have done better, if, instead of recon-
structing logic from its foundation, he had entered into the
spirit of the older system, and, seeing it to be theoretically
sound, had indulged his scientific ardour in developing that
system so as to make it practically fruitful and useful. All
the criticism which it is here possible for me to make upon
his crowning Indirect Method is, that I believe it would
have cost far less trouble to develop the traditional doctrine
to meet the cases of complex reasoning he has in view than
to devise a brand-new system to the confusion of Aristotle.
It is a case where one must have regard equally to sound-
ness of theoretic principle and to ease of practical applica-
tion. In the foregoing remarks it has been urged in various
ways that the older logic is theoretically sound in its bases
and that Mr. Jevons's system is theoretically unsound.
JEVONS'S FORMAL LOGIC. 165
How shall one decide between them on the other count of
practical utility ? Would it be unfair to take the most com-
plex instances of reasoning which Mr. Jevons cites as high
triumphs — the highest he gives — of his method, and, if one
could show that they are more easily solved by the old logic
properly interpreted, then infer that even on the practical
side the new system is inferior ? It would not be a decisive
test, for Mr. Jevons might bring forward still more complex
problems which one knows not beforehand if one could
resolve : but at all events it would not be unfair, nor for
that matter undecisive against Mr. Jevons as he appears
deliberately in his book. Well then ! I affirm that the
most complex problems there solved up to those on p. 117
can, as special logical questions, be more easily and shortly
dealt with upon the principles and with the recognised
methods of the traditional logic ; and till I have cases put
before me where this doctrine proves to be practically
impotent, I am bound, in consideration of its clear theoretic
superiority, to prefer it to the system, however ingenious,
of Mr. Jevons. l
1 Take his last and most complex example : " Every A is one only of
the two B or C, D is both B and C except when B is E and then it is
neither ; therefore no A is D ". Here the mention of E as E has no
bearing on the special conclusion A is not I) and may be dropt, while
the implication is kept in view ; otherwise, for simplification, let BC
stand for "both B and C," and be for "neither B nor C". The pre-
misses then are
(1) D is either BC or be,
(2) A is neither BC nor be,
which is a well-recognised form of Dilemma with conclusion A is not
D. Or, by expressing (*2) as A is-not either BC or be, the conclusion
may be got in Camestres. The reader may compare Mr. Jevons's pro-
cedure on p. 117. If it be objected that we have here by the traditional
processes got only a special conclusion, it is a sufficient reply that any
conclusion by itself must be special. What other conclusion from these
premisses is the common logic powerless to obtain ?
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.1
THE readers of this journal have now had set before them
reports on the past and present state of philosophical study
at the ancient English universities, and at the younger but
still venerable sister-university of Dublin. There are other
academic seats in the country that have a history of philo-
sophical achievement, and are now active towards issues
which it is important to understand. But in the present
series of articles there may be some advantage if, before
passing to the Scottish universities, and thence extending
the survey abroad, attention is drawn to the state of philo-
sophical study in London, which is itself the seat of a
university, and one moreover that has been called into being
within the last half-century expressly to meet the wants of
these days.
London is the seat of a university, yet one can hardly
speak of philosophy at London as at Oxford, Cambridge or
Dublin ; and why ? Its mere size, vast beyond comparison
though it be, need not keep it from being identified with a
university, when other great capitals are rendered illustrious
by nothing more than their academic fame. Nor is it
necessary that a university should have sprung up in a by-
gone age to become the genius of the place : the University
of Berlin is but a few years older than the University of
London. Eather must the reason be sought in some special
disproportion between this university and its metropolitan
seat.
The University does indeed occupy no very prominent
position in London. An examining board which does its
work, for the most part, out of all relation to such instruction
as the place affords, cannot, whatever its merits may be,
play the part of a great informing power whose influence is
felt throughout the whole intellectual life of the place.
1 Mind, i. 531.
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 167
Merits the University assuredly has, and not least as regards
the encouragement of philosophical study, but they avail
nothing to bring it into prominence in the world of London.
What it accomplishes it does for the remotest corners of the
country, nay, for the very ends of the earth, as much as for.
London ; and let who will make light of an influence so
wide. Yet, if it accomplishes for London nothing more
than for the ends of the earth, one sees perhaps how it may
bear its name in vain — how the higher education in London
itself may be starved for the benefit of unattached learners
up and down the country or the alien.
The University of London, now fixed in Burlington
Gardens, was not the first bearer of the name. The title
was originally assumed by a different institution, which,
projected in 1825, and established in the imposing building
in Gower Street before the end of 1828, was finally con-
stituted under its present name of University College in the
same year, 1836, that first saw a university founded in the
metropolis with the legal privilege of conferring degrees.
The original (self-styled) London University was meant to
be a university in the Scottish or German sense. Being
designed in the first instance for the education of those who
by reason of religious restrictions or otherwise were excluded
from Oxford and Cambridge, it naturally looked elsewhere
for its model. The instruction, duly supplemented by
written and oral examinations, was to be given by public
professorial lectures, in place of the tutorial system pre-
dominant at the older universities. On the other hand, it
was far removed from that notion of a university which
time and circumstances have actually realised in London.
It was to be first and foremost a place of instruction in
all the higher departments of knowledge — a true centre of
enlightenment befitting the greatness of the capital. The
degrees which it hoped to obtain the right to confer were to
be given in relation to instruction only. At the same time
its scheme of instruction bore one distinctive feature. It
was not only, like some other universities (the German and,
practically, the Scottish), to assume no charge of the re-
ligious education of its students, leaving this to their natural
guardians, but it was to have no theological department of
168 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
instruction. There was no need, its projectors thought, to
undertake a function as regarded the Established Church
that was more than provided for at Oxford and Cambridge,
and there was no possibility of devising a common system of
theological instruction for the variety of sects that would be
its first constituents, or for the variety of races that might
be attracted to a metropolitan seat of learning. The very
circumstances and conditions that necessitated the founding
of a new seat of superior instruction for whole classes of the
community cut off from all chance of higher culture, seemed
to impose the exclusion of theology from the scheme.
The claims of Philosophy as a means of liberal education
were least likely to be overlooked, for among the founders
of the new institution were James Mill and Grote, then a
young man much under the influence of the elder thinker.
In the first Statement, issued in 1827, respecting the nature
and objects of the foundation, there were announced among
the professorships to be instituted one of Logic and Philo-
sophy of the Human Mind, and one of Moral and Political
Philosophy (besides a chair of Political Economy). " As
the Physical Sciences aim at ascertaining the most general
facts observed by sense in the things which are the objects
of thought, so the Mental Sciences seek to determine the
most general facts relating to thought or feeling, which are
made known to the being who thinks by his own conscious-
ness ; " and the Statement goes on to explain how, though
" the subdivision of this part of knowledge would be very
desirable on account of its importance and intricacy," it
would in the first instance be provided for by the chair of
Logic, while the chair of Moral (and Political) Philosophy
would deal with Ethics as distinguished from the other
moral science of Jurisprudence which would also claim the
attention of the general student. A Second Statement (1828),
explaining in great detail the plan of instruction to be
followed in the University, declares in relation to the two
professorships that, though the names Logic and Moral
Philosophy " are neither correctly indicative of the parts of
learning to be expressed by them, nor is such a distribution
of the subject thereby effected as strict science would
demand, the Council have deemed it better to adopt them
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 169
because known and received, than to venture upon others
which, if they were less imperfect, would probably, because
more strange, be less acceptable". "The Logic Class will
have for its province that department of mental phenomena
in which all that relates to knowledge or the acquisition and
formation of ideas is concerned. The Moral Philosophy
Class will have for its province that department of the
mental phenomena in which all that relates to action is
concerned ; or, more properly speaking, those peculiar states
of mind which are the immediate antecedents of our actions,
and from which we therefore say that our actions proceed."
It was added that as in these classes the youthful mind
was introduced for the first time to the great mental pro-
cesses of Generalisation and Abstraction, there was "more
than usual occasion for constant examination, for the fre-
quent prescription of written exercises, and for all the ope-
rations of that active study which more speedily imparts a
mastery over a new set of ideas than passively listening to a
lecture or perusing a book " ; accordingly, a more than usual
portion of time would be set apart for those purposes. No
less than two hours (one for examination, &c.) every day were
to be given to Logic and Philosophy of the Human Mind in
the student's third year (along with Chemistry and Natural
Philosophy), and nearly as much time to Moral and Political
Philosophy in the fourth year (along with Jurisprudence,
Political Economy and Natural Philosophy). There are
those who will be interested to read of so serious a scheme
of philosophical instruction being at that time propounded
in London, and I have therefore quoted from the Statements
at some length — all the more because the scheme was one
that in the event did not find favour with the Fates. In
making the appointment to the chair of Philosophy of Mind
and Logic (as later it came to be called), differences of
opinion revealed themselves within the Council which kept
it unfilled till 1830, when it was assigned to the Rev. John
Hoppus, a follower of Thomas Brown in philosophy, who
continued to hold it till 1866 in the teeth of circumstances
that could hardly have been more adverse to the cause of
philosophical study. The chair of Moral and Political Philo-
sophy has never been filled to this day.
170 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
The scheme of philosophical instruction did in truth only
share the evil destiny reserved for the whole project to
establish in London a true seat of academic influence. It
was certainly no mean intelligence that dictated the lines of
the project, as any one may yet see who will read the re-
markable Statements issued by the Council of the new institu-
tion ; and at first everything promised well. The founders,
if they underrated the natural obstacles in the way, had
some reason for indulging in their hopeful, not to say
sanguine, visions of success. The proverbial schoolmaster
was then fairly abroad, and there was need of the professor
to finish his work. Nor was there wanting to the projected
London University the countenance of some in the highest
place, and of more who were marked out for power in the
coming days of political reform. A sum which reached the
figure of £160,000 was quickly subscribed for the rearing
of an appropriate edifice and for the due equipment of an
instructing staff, which included some of the most dis-
tinguished names of the day in literature and science. And
yet the project failed to make way. It roused the bitterest
political resentment because there were Radicals among its
founders, and unmeasured scorn was poured on it because
it counted on support from the religious dissenters. The
exclusion of theology, however anxiously explained to be
inevitable, of course meant a godless institution, and straight-
way its foes were moved to establish another seat of superior
instruction in London, of which theology should be the
corner-stone. Hardly had the so-called University opened
its gates in Gower Street, when King's College was set up
as a rival in the Strand ; and London, which till then had
been devoid of the means of higher education, found itself
all of a sudden provided not with one academic institution
but with two. Political and religious contention could in a
year overdo what centuries had left undone. The young
institution was from the first prevented from becoming the
great metropolitan centre of instruction which was the main
part of its design ; and, in as far as it aimed at securing the
legal status of a university with degree-conferring powers, it
was doomed to be still more effectually thwarted. The
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge would not do the
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 171
work it was struggling into being to perform, but they could
stoop to crush the semblance of a rival. When the Govern-
ment (even after the foundation of King's College) was on
the point of granting a university-charter in 1830, it had to
be dropped at the last stage, just before passing the Great
Seal, because Oxford objected to the liberty of conferring
degrees in arts, and Cambridge would not hear of degrees
being granted at all. Again moved for about two years
later, the grant of a charter was again opposed by the same
jealous influences, as arso (with more reason) by the medical
corporations and schools in London. To obviate the opposi-
tion of these last the claim to give medical degrees was
surrendered, and the House of Commons in the first re-
formed Parliament (1833) supported the petition as regarded
degrees in arts and laws by a great majority. The Govern-
ment, however, though not unfriendly, was in a real
difficulty by reason of the existence of King's College, which
could not be left out of account while it could neither be
merged with the " London University " nor incorporated
separately with full academic privileges. The only course
that seemed open was to create a university over the heads
of both institutions, which should have the sole duty of
examining while they should have the sole function of giving
instruction. In this sense accordingly a resolution was taken,
and the University of London was formally constituted in
1836, the parent-institution being at the same time regularly
incorporated as University College. The exclusion of
theology from the University as finally constituted gave
authoritative sanction to the principles that had guided the
original movers in their single-minded effort to found in
London a home of the higher learning befitting the capital
of the country ; and it was with the hope of seeing their
dream after all realised that they accepted without a grudge
for their costly institution a secondary rank in the academic
system. In point of fact, it was still possible that a
University in the fullest sense should grow up in London
between the new examining board with its State-privileges
on the one hand and the two Colleges as they might be
developed on the other. But, while nothing more was done
either by the State or by private munificence to support and
172 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
develop the instruction of the Colleges, it had been provided
in the charter of the University that other institutions in or
out of London might be affiliated to it, and this provision
lay so little dormant that in the next twenty years a host of
colleges and secondary schools scattered through the country
acquired an equal right with the metropolitan Colleges to
send up candidates for examination. There was then an
end of the dream. The University might or might not have
a useful work to do in the country, and might or might not
do it ; but it could never more hope to sway the intellectual
life of London.
Such as it was during those twenty years, the University
of London did by its system of examinations do something
to bring forward Philosophy as a subject of study. Every
candidate for the B.A. degree was required to pass in Logic
and Moral Philosophy, and a man's position here was taken
into account in determining the honours-list in classics and
mathematics. The higher degree of M.A. might be obtained
by a special line of study which consisted of Logic, Moral
Philosophy, Philosophy of the Mind, Political Philosophy
and Political Economy. Further, the noteworthy regula-
tion was enforced from the beginning that Doctors in
Medicine should pass an examination in the Elements of
Intellectual Philosophy, Logic and Moral Philosophy, unless
they had previously taken a degree in arts. The actual
requirements, however, within this scheme were trifling
enough. Bachelors of Arts were expected only to have read
part of Whately's Logic, and, in Moral Philosophy, part of
Paley's treatise, with Butler's three Sermons on Human
Nature. For the degree of M.D., the examination, at first left
open to the discretion of the examiners, came in time to turn
upon the first book of the Novum Organum, Cousin's Analysis
of Locke's Essay, the first part of Butler's Analogy, and
Stewart's Outlines of Moral Philosophy (not so mean a pre-
scription of its kind). The M.A. examination remained
nominally open, but from the years 1842-3 onwards till 1857
the examiners, Mr. T. Burcham, a police magistrate (who
also did duty in classics), and the Rev. Henry Alford, after-
wards Dean of Canterbury, were never changed — with the
natural result as regards range of topics. The effect upon
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 173
instruction as given in the metropolitan Colleges may easily
be understood. No candidate preparing for the B.A. degree
from University College had the least occasion to attend the
professor's lectures on Philosophy of Mind and Logic, and
accordingly the professor, having no hold upon the only
auditors on whom he might regularly count, lectured during
all those years to veiy thinly covered benches. King's College,
which had started without any chair of Philosophy and ob-
viously set much less store by the subject, was not moved
now to acquire an interest in it, and went on without any
means of philosophical instruction.
No change of any importance was made in the system of
philosophical examinations as at first constituted, till under
the new charter (9th April, 1858) the decisive alteration in
the status of the University was consummated, whereby it
was cut loose from all connexion (except in the medical
department) with particular places of instruction, metro-
politan or other. While the question of the new constitu-
tion was still pending, in 1857, the examiners in Logic and
Moral Philosophy, Messrs. Bain and Spencer Baynes, then
newly appointed in place of the two who had acted together
for so many years, addressed a formal representation to the
Senate on the state of the examinations and submitted a,
very different scheme, which, with some amendments, was
finally adopted at the end of 1858 and has since remained in
force without further change, except as it was made to apply
to the degrees in Science instituted in 1859. By this time
Mr. Grote, having brought his History to a close, had become
one of the most active members of the Senate (which he joined
in 1850) , and his interest in Philosophy, always great yet grow-
ing ever stronger with his years, led him to take special
charge of the proposed scheme so long as it remained under
discussion. As the University was about to admit all
comers to its examinations, it was important, while sub-
stituting a scheme of reasonable extent in place of the old
one, so to frame it as to encourage a resort to systematic
instruction ; and to this end it seemed the most effective
course to prescribe no particular books but simply to indicate,,
as the new examiners proposed, a range of topics represent-
ing the main divisions of progressive philosophical inquiry.
174 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
The scheme propounded, and at first designed to bear the
new title of " Logic and Mental Philosophy," was however
vehemently opposed by some of the affiliated Eoman Catholic
Colleges on the ground that Mental Philosophy (embracing,
as was stated, the Senses, the Intellect and the Will) was a
department of knowledge little less vexed by polemics than
theology itself, so that the examiners for the time being
would be made judges of philosophical orthodoxy ; and also
on the ground that, even if no such evil result ensued as the
propagation of a system and the creation of a London
University school of Philosophy, yet Catholic students
would be placed at a disadvantage, being precluded from the
study of modern psychological theories till an advanced period
of their course, after they were indoctrinated in the body of
philosophical truth ancillary to the Theology of the Church
(Minutes of the Senate, 1858, p. 87). It was implied, if not
expressly asserted, that the previous scheme, prescribing
some parts of Whately, &c., was unobjectionable — probably
because of its triviality. The Minutes (Dec. 15, 1858) contain
a very remarkable statement penned by Mr. Grote in reply
to the objections ; and what he urged against the notion of
the least design to impose with the weight of University
authority a particular view of philosophical orthodoxy, has
certainly been borne out by the selection of examiners (no
one of whom can serve more than five years running) from
that time to the present. Professor Spencer Baynes, one
of the present two examiners, has been as much in favour
with the Senate as Professor Bain, and the others, in order
of appointment, have been the late Professor Ferrier, Mr.
Poste, the present writer, the Hector of Lincoln, Mr. Venn
and now Professor Jevons.
The principle of the scheme of examinations in Logic and
Moral Philosophy (the old title being in the end retained), as
it came into full working order from the year 1860, is a very
intelligible one. A minimum requirement for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts, or of Science, is variously extended and
intensified for the grade of Bachelor with Honour, and for
the higher degrees of M.A. and D.Sc., while it is (in practice)
somewhat attenuated for the professional degree of Doctor
of Medicine or Master of Surgery. The University of
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 175
London exacts a certain amount of philosophical knowledge
from every Bachelor of Arts as part of a general liberal educa-
tion, and from every Bachelor of Science as part of his general
scientific equipment. " Names, Notions and Propositions,
Syllogism, Induction and subsidiary operations " mark with
sufficient plainness the scope of the examination in Logic ;
and the heads " Senses, Intellect and Will, including the
Theory of Moral Obligation" show that Moral Philosophy
is understood in the wider sense of Mental Philosophy, while
this last is interpreted chiefly as Psychology. Bachelors,
whether of Arts or Science, may thereupon subject them-
selves to a more protracted (two days instead of one) and
severer trial in the same subjects, supplemented by the topic
of "Emotions," and with the " Theory of Ethics " brought
into greater prominence : a scholarship of i'50 for three
years may here be gained. The Bachelor of Arts who now
proceeds (after not less than eight months) to the special
degree of Master will, if he chooses Branch III., be subjected
(for three days) to examination in the old topics (only
Ethical Systems instead of Theory) supplemented by a special
prescription, varied every year, in Political Philosophy and
History of Philosophy,1 besides Political Economy (one day) :
here may be won a gold medal worth £20. The still more
special degree of Doctor of Science, open only to Bachelors
of Science of not less than two years' standing, may be
taken in " Mental Science," with the main topics as for M.A.
set out as principal subject, and the following as subsidiary
subjects — " Physiology of the Nervous System and Organs
of the Senses in man and other animals, History of Philo-
sophy, Political Philosophy, and Political Economy " (in all
four days) : "a thorough practical knowledge of the principal
subject and a general acquaintance with the subsidiary sub-
jects " is here required. Finally the degree of M.D. or M.S.
cannot be obtained without a philosophical examination (three
hours), of which the nominal scope coincides with that for the
B.A. or B.Sc. degrees, though there is a tacit understanding that
1 For 1876 the subjects were : Political Philosophy — Ideal Polities or
States, their nature and use, with special reference to Plato's Republic,
More's Utopia, and Bacon's Neio Atlantis; History of Philosophy — The
development of Locke's principles, Berkeley's Principles of Human
Knowledge and Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.
176 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
those aspects of the subjects should chiefly be considered that
are least remote from the field of medical practice.
The scheme, it will hardly be denied, is not only clearly
conceived but betokens a real concern for the promotion of
philosophical study and work. That philosophy should form
part of every liberal education (B.A.), and that it may then
well engage the special attention of more advanced students
(M.A.) before taking up with a particular profession ; that
Psychology and Logic have their place in a general scientific
discipline (B.Sc.), and that mental research in one or other
of its departments may claim the life-long devotion of
trained scientific powers (D.Sc.) ; lastly, that every medical
man who aspires to the higher dignities of his profession
(M.D., M.S.) should have bestowed some express thought on
the laws of evidence and on the hidden mental life inwoven
with the bodily frame — such is the meaning of the scheme ;
and where is there another university that makes so system-
atic a stand for the cause of philosophy in education ? It
should not be forgotten that even in the early years of the
University the importance of the subject had been, in name
at least, recognised, in deference, it may be supposed, to the
principles of the original movers for university-education in
London ; and thus it was easier for an earnest friend of
philosophical study like Mr. Grote, himself one of them, to
get the reformed scheme in its completeness set on foot when
the new constitution imposed upon the Senate the duty of
making the examinations at once broad and effective. On
looking, however, beyond the scheme itself to its actual
working, there seems less ground for satisfaction, and the
reason will perhaps be found to lie in that very peculiarity
of constitution with reference to which the scheme was so
carefully devised. The Senate would no longer require of
candidates for degrees that they should have been instructed
in particular colleges ; but it hardly expected that a great
proportion of them would cease to frequent any place of
instruction. It started with an earnest determination to
maintain a high standard of requirement : it did not foresee
that away from a base of instruction the standard could be
neither constant nor high.
It was certainly from no desire to discourage systematic
instruction that the more enlightened members of the Senate
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 177
stood by the plan of opening the University examinations to
all comers in the teeth of strong remonstrance from all the
more important affiliated colleges. With affiliation carried
out as it had been in the first twenty years, the truth was
that no shadow of reason remained for excluding almost any
decent secondary school from the list of the institutions
whence the University received certificates for degrees in
arts and laws ; and the only sensible step forward, when
there was no question of taking a great many steps back-
ward to the original position of founding in reality as in
name a University of London, was of course to admit
candidates without reference to their place of instruction.
This had become clear, not only to the majority of the
Senate, who from one motive or another had gone on
relaxing the conditions of affiliation, but also to those
members (like Mr. Grote) who had struggled in vain for the
maintenance of stricter principles ; and the step once fairly
contemplated, there was no stopping short of the final
position that the University should confine itself to its
own work of examining, whether or not candidates had been
regularly instructed at all. It all followed as naturally as
possible from the University being set up, not as a means of
organising the higher instruction in the capital, but to
perform directly a certain useful kind of work for the
country at large. At the same time the notion of fair and
open examination for all with perfect free-trade in teaching
had an air of liberalism about it that imposed on many
minds, as it still is the idol of Mr. Lowe ; and it was only
to be expected that some ardent advocate should urge what
lustre would be shed on the University that welcomed to its
examinations "the heroic stonemason," beholden to no
college whatever for instruction. Nevertheless, as I have
said, the intention of the best heads was rather to encourage
than depress instruction, and as regards the initial (B.A. and
B.Sc.) examination in Philosophy it was even expressly
intimated that the amount of acquirement expected was such
as might fairly be attained by a course of instruction in a
class during the year preceding examination. It is interest-
ing then to see what kind of philosophical study the scheme
of the University has in practice evoked during the last
fifteen years.
12
178 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
The broad result is that a full half of the yearly tale of
Bachelors of Arts (to take the most representative class -of
graduates) acquire their knowledge of philosophy by private
reading without instruction, while the proportion of such
private students to the whole number of candidates for
examination is considerably greater. Of the others who pass
as Bachelors, some ten or twelve may have had more or less
of formal instruction in Catholic or Dissenting theological
colleges, and the rest are students of the only two general
academic institutions that remain in any sort of regular
connexion with the University, namely, University College,
which sends up yearly about a dozen men, and Owens
College, Manchester, whose usual quota is less than half as
many. (King's College, which still does not include Philo-
sophy in its scheme of instruction, has practically ceased to
maintain any relations with the University of which it was
to be a chief feeder.) Now the number of students who go
up from University College shows no tendency to increase,
and the authorities of Owens College have just made it part
of their plea for being turned into an independent university
that fewer and fewer of their instructed students care to
look to the London examinations. Some serious questions
thereupon arise. What is the effect on the philosophical
examinations of the unexpected predominance of private-
study candidates ? And what is the real value of the
carefully elaborated scheme for candidates of that class ? I
am afraid it must be answered that, in such circumstances,
an examination tends to become whatever test a fair pro-
portion of candidates for the time being are found able to
pass. Nobody is to blame, and yet it is so. The authorities
may be sincerely anxious to maintain a good standard, the
examiners may set the most carefully considered papers ; all
the same, when the list of the rejected comes to be
determined, it is not in human nature not to take account
of the actual performance of the bulk of the candidates
and accommodate the standard to the exigencies of the
occasion. Then the candidates, in course of time, discover
that certain books most nearly correspond with the scope of
the examination, and the examiners, however careful they
may be to put open questions, cannot refuse a stereotyped
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 179
form of answer or bear hard on those candidates whose
obviously limited reading has left them without the means
of answering any but a determinate class of questions.
Thus practically the examination comes to turn upon books
after all ; and the formal divorce of the University from any
system of instruction leaves it to be supposed that the
reading of one or two philosophical books constitutes an
effective mental discipline. But nothing could be more
fallacious. I doubt if any one who has read the written
answers of the multifarious crowd of candidates for the B.A.
degree, the majority of whom have come into contact with
no living instructor, can hold it an unmixed good that an
examination in Philosophy is imposed upon all under the
present constitution of the University. The subject, so
nearly concerning every reflective human mind, and most
fitly therefore regarded as crowning a liberal education, is
yet the one of all others that may least be left to undirected
private reading in the case of the mass of students. Certainly
there are a few minds here and there, now and again, who
with or without formal instruction follow a native bent and
can be trusted to work their way to clearness and coherence
of thought on the questions of human origin and destiny, but
with the multitude of learners it is quite otherwise. A little
book knowledge of philosophical questions, when not a
dangerous, is truly a most unprofitable thing. That general
students may profit by a course of philosophical instruction
there is the experience of the Scottish Universities to show ;
and the number of distinguished thinkers who have risen in
the ranks of Scottish professors represents a real national
gain yielded by an organised system of public instruction
in Philosophy. It is to be charged against the London Uni-
versity that all its elaborate machinery does nothing to help
on the work of instruction, but rather has the contrary effect as
regards the higher elements of human culture. At least as
respects Philosophy, while it is certain that Grote and others
looked forward to a great development of instruction, the ad-
vance made in the last fifteen years has been quite insignificant.
University College has its professor of Philosophy of Mind
and Logic who lectures year after year to a small voluntary
class of young students attending the College, with a few
180 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
additional hearers from without, but has no constituency to
draw upon for higher work in the subjects, because candidates
for the special degree of M.A. at the University are a handful
altogether in any year, and, besides, are scattered through
the country, or, if in London, are generally engaged already
in some active pursuit interfering with continuous study.
Owens College in Manchester has a professor who as yet at
least is in no more favourable position as regards auditors,
while he is weighted with the additional subject of political
economy. Besides these two there is no other public professor
of Philosophy in all England outside of Oxford and Cambridge.
Such instruction as is given in some Dissenting theological
colleges or in Catholic colleges is of course discounted, though
it should not be forgotten that one theological seminary in
London has long been signalised by the teaching of Mr.
Martineau. The statement whether as regards the country
,or as regards London will sound incredible to foreign ears,
and may astonish even English readers when presented in
its nakedness. Meanwhile the old Universities, as the
readers of this journal have been told on the best authority,
do not come near to discharging the national work that is
otherwise left undone ; however great be the credit due to
the band of earnest instructors who are labouring to establish
a due balance of education at Cambridge by the revival of
Philosophy, or whatever be the evidence of serious thinking
at Oxford at a level high above the arena of the examination-
schools. One can only hope for a day to come when in
London some organised system of highest instruction will
supersede the wasteful efforts .of rival institutions now ill-
equipped or incomplete, and trust that in that day the import-
ance of Philosophy as a mediating influence between letters
and science will be fully recognised. How the reform may
be brought to pass, there is little as yet to show. Perhaps
the University of London, having done a good work in
stirring up the country to a sense of the need of broad
secondary education, will after all be transformed, for the
good of the country's capital, into the likeness of that original
seat of high learning which was projected to bear the name ;
taking up into one coherent academic system the two
Colleges that sprang out of the first movement and the
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 181
special scientific schools that, by a lavish appropriation of
public money, have in later years been founded without the
least regard to the private sacrifices made half a century ago.
Perhaps University College itself, as the original depositary
of the academic trust for London, will, after its long struggle
with faint success to make the higher education self-supporting,
receive from public or private sources the endowment that
all human experience has proved to be indispensable for its
maintenance, and will expand into a great school of all
science and learning that need not look outside to the
cramping standard of even the best examining body that is
nothing else. In one way or another the reproach that
adheres to superior instruction in London and to philosophical
instruction with the rest cannot too soon be taken away.1
1 Within the last few months a Society has actually been formed with
the professed object of organising University Education in London, and
as, in the view of the foregoing article, the question of philosophical
instruction is bound up with the larger problem, a word or two upon the
latest attempt to solve it may not be out of place. The Society has
arisen out of a movement by one or two meritorious institutions that give
instruction in the evening to persons engaged in business by day. These
were desirous to obtain the services of young Cambridge lecturers like
those who in late years have been breaking ground in northern towns ;
but oddly enough, the humble design was given out as the beginning of
a scheme for University Education in the metropolis, as if such a thing
had never before been thought of, and London were another Nottingham
upon which a reflexion of academic light might be induced to fall.
Soon, however, the movers and their influential friends, some of whom
were less ignorant than forgetful of what had been done in former days,
awoke to a sense of the difference between London and a provincial town,
and the scheme then took a new shape. The notion was now to
invoke the two older Universities with the University of London to
take the metropolitan field in charge with the view of supplementing
the instruction already given within it, and a very elaborate working-
plan was devised. But as Oxford and Cambridge have since declined
the proffered charge, the Society is left to make what way it can within
London itself.
One desires to speak with all respect of any serious effort directed
towards the end proposed, and there has undoubtedly been no small
energy displayed in the establishment of this Society. The observation
cannot however be forborne that its founders have from the first kept
before them no distinct conception of what is meant by University
Education. If their main object, as there is still some reason to suppose,
is to provide additional evening instruction in different parts of London, the
name of University Education is surely misapplied. If, on the other hand,
it be true academic work which they are eager to foster, the sjjnplest way,
one would think, is to develop the two Colleges that have struggled
to maintain the higher learning for nearly fifty years past. But it
would seem as if in London there were never to be an end of new
beginnings.
182 PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON.
Supplementary Note. — For an important change (of principle) in the
B.Sc. regulations, just announced, see News at the end of this number.
Since the article on Philosophy in London in the present number was
written, an important change has been announced in the plan of examina-
tions for the degree of Bachelor of Science in the University, whereby
Logic and Psychology will cease to be compulsory subjects ; and thus
vanishes one of the most characteristic features of the general scheme of
the University as set forth in the article. The B.Sc. examination will
as before consist of two stages, but will not henceforth have reference to
a merely general discipline in the sciences. At the second stage, instead
of being required as heretofore to pass in five different subjects making
with the four subjects of the first stage a tolerably complete round of the
chief sciences, a candidate in future need not bring up more than three
out of nine subjects, of which Logic and Psychology form one. That is
to say, he will begin to specialise before reaching the grade of Bachelor.
Care, however, is taken to make the earlier examination more comprehen-
sive than hitherto — in fact, fairly co-extensive with the field of general
science as commonly understood. The practical and other reasons for
the change are very strong, nor is it greatly to be regretted, in the pre-
sent state of instruction or feeling about instruction as described in the
article, that the philosophical examination will no longer be imposed on
all the candidates. At the same time it is right to point out that the
general scheme of the University is dislocated by giving the B.Sc. degree
(even partially) a special character ; while if Logic and Psychology are
allowed (as they are) to rank as Science, they cannot properly be ranged
(as they are) with departments so special — not to say concrete — as botany,
zoology, or physical geography and geology. About Psychology there may
be a question, if it is not clearly conceived as the great fundamental sub-
jective science — the root of one half of human knowledge, or rather, the
key to one whole side of all human knowledge ; but surely Logic at least
pertains to the most general scientific discipline. In no longer requiring
a knowledge of Logic from its Bachelors of Science, the University is
throwing away one of its chief distinctions, and will not so easily replace
or recover it.
No change has been made in the regulations for admission to the degree
of D.Sc., except that candidates who have prolonged the interval between
the first and second stages of the B.Sc. examination from one year to two
years or more, over their special studies, may go up for the Doctorate
after a single year instead of two years as before. This change seems a
reasonable one in the new circumstances ; but the reform really called for
in the D.Sc. regulations is that some evidence of original work should be
required from the candidates, by way of written dissertation or otherwise.
In the department of Mental Science at least, the written answers to
papers of miscellaneous questions which are at present the only test
imposed, keep the degree practically at the level of the ordinary M.A.
(Branch III.), except in so far as the greater range of subjects implies a
longer and wider study. But this very width of range - extending from
PHILOSOPHY IN LONDON. 183
Physiology of the Nervous System through Mental Philosophy (in all its
branches) to Political Philosophy — is itself a grievance. When a man
has begun to specialise to any purpose, he will find in any one of the
subjects indicated occupation enough — supposing that " a thorough
practical knowledge " is by all available means exacted. It is doubtless
because of the extreme width of the range of the examination that in
all the last sixteen years since the degree was instituted, no more than
two candidates have presented themselves for the Doctorate in Mental
Science. One of them, Mr. P. K. Bay, a native of Bengal, has this year
succeeded in passing, but such a result is hardly a sufficient justification
of the present examination-scheme.
THE LOGIC OF "IF".1
I HAVE lately come across a passage in Clarissa Harlowe
where Richardson indicates with great clearness a dis-
tinction which has long seemed to me to be overlooked by
logicians in their treatment of Hypothetical Syllogism. It
is in the admirable scene where Morden and Lovelace are
first brought together, and runs thus; : Morden : " But if you
have the value for my cousin that you say you have, you
must needs think " Lovelace : "You must allow rue, sir,
to interrupt you. If I have the value I say I have. I hope,
sir, when I say I have that value, there is no cause for that
if, as you pronounced it with an emphasis." Morden:
" Had you heard me out, Mr. Lovelace, you would have
found that my if was rather an if of inference than of
doubt."
The question has been much debated among logicians
whether the so-called Hypothetical Syllogism of this type
If A is B, C is D
But A is B
/. CisD
is a mediate inference like the common Categorical Syllogism,
or whether the conclusion is not immediately drawn from the
one premiss ' If A is B, C is D '. Prof. Bain, for example
(Logic, i. 116), would deny that the reasoning is mediate,
and the reader may consult his work for a short summary
of the different arguments urged by Mansel and other dis-
tinguished logicians on the same side of the question. Some
of the arguments, indeed, are too plainly defective, as when
Mansel declares that in the Hypothetical Syllogism " the
minor (A is B) and the conclusion (C is D) indifferently
change places and each of them is merely one of the two
members constituting the major " — which is not the case in
Categorical Syllogism. Here he commits a very great
blunder, since it is notorious that ' A is B ' cannot be got as
1 Mind, ii. 264.
THE LOGIC OF "IF". 185
a conclusion with ' C is D ' as second premiss. However,
the whole weight of authority in favour of the inference
being immediate is undoubtedly great, and if one takes the
other view, some explanation must be found for the strong
array of opinion that may be cited against it.
It seems obvious enough that when the proposition ' If A
is B, C is D ' is uttered as a pure hypothesis — the if, as
Richardson expresses it, being one of doubt — it is not pos-
sible to pass directly to the assertion that ' C is D '. This
can be reached only through the other assertion ' A is B ' ;
and what is the reasoning then but mediate ? If the con-
clusion, which is quite a different proposition from the
original datum, is here not mediately reached, there is no
such thing as mediate reasoning in categoricals. Whatever
meaning there is in saying that given ' M is P,' we arrive at
the different proposition 'SisP' only mediately— through
4 S is M,' there is as much meaning in saying the like of
' C is D ' obtained as a positive assertion from the supposi-
tion ' If A is B, C is D ' only through the positive assertion
' A is B '. For that matter, the categorical major ' M is P '
can itself be expressed as a hypothetical ' If M, then P ' ;
then follows in the minor an assertion of M (namely S) ;
whence as the conclusion an assertion of P. The only
immediate inferences that can be drawn from the purely
hypothetical proposition ' If A is B, C is D ' must them-
selves be hypothetical. These namely follow : ' If C is not D,
A is not B,' ' In some case (at least once) where C is D, A is
B ' — the logical contrapositive and converse respectively of
the original. But these are utterly unlike the conclusion
4 C is D ' got from the same hypothesis through the assertion
4 A is B '.
With what reason, then, can it in any case be maintained
that ' C is D ' is immediately got from 'If A is B, C is D ' ?
With very good reason, when if, instead of meaning suppose
that, is used for since, seeing that, or became. It is plain that
the original proposition may be thus understood : ' Since A
is B, C is D '. Or take a material case. ' If it rains, the
street is wet,' interpreted strictly as a bare supposition, can
never of itself lead to the categorical assertion 'The street
is wet ' (as a matter of fact) : it only involves immediately
186 THE LOGIC OF " IF ".
such other suppositions as these — ' If the street is not wet,
it does not rain,' ' If the street is wet, it may be from rain '.
But the same expression is also used on a very different
occasion : ' It rains (do you say ?) , why then of course the
street is wet,' ' To be sure the street is wet, for does it not
rain ? ' ' No doubt, as it rains, the street is wet '. Here we
know immediately that ' the street is wet ' (or C is D), for
this is the assertion in the proposition ; and the 7/-clause
is not proposed as a possible ground for a conclusion, but is
stated shortly as the actual reason of a fact. When ex-
panded, it corresponds not to the first premiss of the
Hypothetical Syllogism, but to the two premisses together.
That is to say, if the clause is regarded as containing a
supposition at all, it contains, besides the formal supposition
' If A is B, C is D,' the positive assurance ' A is B '. Of
course from the two premisses thus taken together, the con-
clusion ' C is D ' follows at once or immediately ; but the
same is true of the conclusion of a Categorical Syllogism as
following from its two premisses. Now, when if thus covers
an assertion of fact within a supposition, it may be called,
as by Richardson, an if of inference, as containing the whole
reasoned ground of the last clause in the sentence. But
such a sentence is no longer the ' hypothetical proposition '
of logic— that kind of thought-utterance which, though it
has a different form, is as simple as the simplest categorical
proposition, seeing (as before suggested) there is no cate-
gorical proposition which may not be expressed as a
hypothetical, and vice versa.
The true and simple sense of If in the antecedent part of
a purely hypothetical proposition may be otherwise brought
out by considering its analogy with the subject in a cate-
gorical. Take a 'proposition in Euclid. It is exactly the
same whether we say, ' The angles at the base of an
isosceles triangle are equal,' or 'If a triangle is isosceles, the
angles at its base are equal ' ; and Euclid, like everybody
else, falls as readily into the one expression as the other.
Now to suppose that the consequent in this pure hypo-
thetical is immediately given with the antecedent or follows
from it directly, can amount only to saying that the
predicate (in the categorical expression) is directly implied
THE LOGIC OF " IF". 187
in the subject ; or, in other words, that the proposition is
analytic. But it is, as we know, in this case synthetic, and
to bring about the synthesis an express proof is necessary.
Just so we must not think of getting the consequent of a
pure hypothetical from the antecedent except in the case
where there is direct implication, as ' If triangle, then
trilateral '.
It is worth while adding in this connexion that the other
form of proposition ranged by logicians with the Hypo-
thetical, namely the Disjunctive, may be shown to be as
simple as the pure Hypothetical, being in fact a special case
of it. The common view is that it involves at least two
hypothetical propositions, or, as some say, even four. Thus
' Either A is B or C is D ' is resolved by some into the four
hypothetical —
If A is B, C is not D (1)
If A is not B, C is D (2)
If C is D, A is not B (3)
If C is not D, A is B (4)
— but the first and third of these are rejected by others, and
with reason, because they are in fact implied only when the
alternatives are logical opposites. The remaining proposi-
tions (2) and (4) are, however, the logical contrapositives of
one another ; and this amounts to saying that either of
them ~by itself is a full and adequate expression of the original
disjunctive.
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY. '
BESIDES the remarkable work whose name is placed at the
head of this article,2 two other important contributions have
recently been made to the history of philosophical thinking
in England. Prof. Kuno Fischer has taken his old mono-
' graph on Francis Bacon (known to English readers since
1857 in Mr. Oxenford's translation), and so recast and
enlarged it as to give not only a more adequate representa-
tion of Bacon as a man and thinker, but an account of the
development of the ' Philosophy of Experience ' as far as
Hume, no longer quite too meagre to stand as a side-piece
to that history of Modern Philosophy which he has traced
on a great scale from Descartes through Spinoza and Leib-
niz to Kant and his successors.3 The book in its new form
appeared in 1875, and in the same year, by a curious coin-
cidence, the late M. de Remusat, who had before followed
close on Fischer with an independent monograph on Bacon,
came forward with a History of Philosophy in England from
Bacon to Locke* There is evidence of genuine • research in
this work, especially among the less-known writers of the
seventeenth century, which should have drawn attention to
it in England before this time. On the present occasion it is
simply mentioned, because of the period which it seeks to
compass. Where M. de Remusat leaves off, there Mr. Leslie
Stephen in his brilliant volumes may be said to take up the
1 Mind, ii. 352.
2 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, by LESLIE
STEPHEN. 2 vols. London : Smith, Elder, & Co. 1876.
3 Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger. Entwicklungsgeschichte der
Erfahrungsphilosophie. Von KUNO FISCHER. 2te vollig umgearbeitete
Auflage. Leipzig : Brockhaus, 1875. The greater work, Geschichte der
neuern Philosophic, has thus far been brought down to Schelling.
4 Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu' a Locke,
par CHARLES DE REMUSAT. 2 tomes. Paris : Didier et Cie., 1875.
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 189
tale ; and, though there could not well be a greater difference in
the spirit and scope of the two works, there is much in the
later history that may be better understood for the careful
record of the earlier time which we owe to a foreign hand.
Much as he has to say about philosophers and their work,
great and small, Mr. Stephen has not written or professed to
write a History of Philosophy in the stricter sense. His aim
and even his method of constructing the book are disclosed
with the utmost candour. It was his first object to trace
systematically and in full detail the course of Religious
Thought from 1(588 to 1750, the period defined and rapidly
sketched in Mr. Pattison's well-known essay. Lechler, more
than thirty years ago, gave an adequate account of the Deists
proper, but did riot concern himself, save incidentally, with
their orthodox opponents, though these (as Mr. Pattison sought
particularly to impress) betrayed the same general tendencies
of thought. It accordingly seemed necessary to Mr. Stephen
to trace back the common theological tendencies of the age to
the philosophical ideas then prevalent ; and upon this there
was an interest in showing how the principles accepted in
philosophy and theology were applied to practice in the
sphere of moral and political thought, or, again, reflected in
the imaginative literature of the time. As thus explained,
the scope of the book is of course very different from that of
a technical History of Philosophy, and it is in fact so com-
prehensive that almost everything appears to be included in
the author's survey of thought or intellectual activity in the
century, except the work of special science.
Is he justified in giving to the word Thought at once such
an extension and such a restriction, as to include in the same
treatise with thinkers like Locke and Hume and Butler, poets
and novelists and preachers like Burns and Fielding and
Wesley, to the exclusion of scientific inquirers like Newton
or Black or Hunter ? Mr. Stephen, though himself doubt-
ing whether his title is not too ambitious, evidently is guided
by some definite principle in determining the scope and limits
of his work ; and perhaps it may be gathered, in default of
more express statement, from the beginning of his last
chapter, where he passes, after dealing successively with
philosophers, theologians, moralists and publicists, to the
190 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
delineation of what he calls the ' Characteristics ' of the age.
The literature of a people, we are told, may be disposed under
three heads : (1) historical, which records facts and sum-
marises or amplifies existing knowledge ; (2) speculative,
which discusses the truth of the theories binding knowledge
together ; and (3) imaginative, which utters the emotions
generated by the conditions in which men are or believe
themselves to be placed. Here, Science is either excluded from
Literature altogether as a technical pursuit, or it is included
in the wider sense of History, which regards nature in all its
varied aspects as well as man. In either case, since History
itself is not brought within Mr. Stephen's scheme, Science
as the sum of existing positive knowledge about the world is
naturally excluded. But besides the properly philosophic
thought which seeks rationally to co-ordinate the variety of
human knowledge with a view more or less direct to
practical conduct, it is natural to consider the imaginative
synthesis, since by this (as he urges) is determined the
action of the majority of mankind, and further (as he
might have added) because the philosophical synthesis, not
being in the same way verifiable as the generalisations of
positive science, must alwrays contain an element of subjective
sentiment allying it to imaginative literature. If some such
view was present to Mr. Stephen's mind, there is not wanting
a good reason for the limitation of subjects in his book ;
while, on the other hand, his readers may be glad that he
has so far widened his scheme as to give them, in his well
and often brilliantly written pages, a varied picture of
national thought and feeling alive with human interest,
instead of the abstract and one-featured record, apt to be mis-
leading, which History of Philosophy commonly is . Nor in this
case at least is good literary effect procured at the expense
of careful research. The one objection, perhaps, in point of
form, that can be brought against the book as a History of
Thought, is the unequal prominence given to the phases of
religious as compared with philosophical opinion, — if it is
not too ungracious to say so, when Mr. Stephen has implied
in his ingenuous preface that, but for his interest in the reli-
gious movements, we might not have had from him a view
•of the century at all.
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUBY. 191
In Mr. Stephen's view one figure stands forward at the
beginning, and re-appears towering above all others in every
scene of the history. Whether it be the philosophy, or the
theology, or the morals, or the politics of the century that is
under review, the decisive word, representing the last out-
come of what was in men's minds, is always uttered by
Hume. Half-way through the century dogmatic speculation
about the supernatural ceased of a sudden : Hume had
spoken, and ever afterwards those who were concerned to
save the conclusions of metaphysical philosophy had no
choice but to try for them by another road. About the same
time the hot theological warfare that had filled the world
with clamour for two generations died away : Hume had
sprung a mine that sent into the air both deists who were not
Christians, and Christian apologists who were but deists. It
took fifty years from the time of Locke before the utilitarian
ethics, so congenial to the national mind, got a definite
philosophical expression — from Hume. Hume left nothing
unsaid which the acutest intellect could say about political
philosophy so long as men were supposed independent atoms,
and there was no thought of organic evolution or serious
consideration of historical development. And if the histori-
cal spirit began to awake in the second half of the century
in preparation for the work of the age to come, even in this
forward movement Hume too had part. When we remem-
ber, besides, who it was that almost disowned the rugged
work of his strong youth, and desired to be judged by the
fastidiously polished but less searching essays of his prime,
we see with what reason Mr. Stephen may take Hume as
quite the representative thinker of a century quick with
intellectual activity, only not the deepest.
Should we try, further, to gain a comprehensive view of the
whole course of thought in the century, as it presents itself to
Mr. Stephen, the spectacle resolves itself into a number of
scenes which, described in very general terms, are these : (1)
A movement of determined philosophical criticism lasting
fifty years or more from Locke to Hume, destructive of the
whole edifice of speculative metaphysic reared by Descartes
and his followers in the seventeenth century, but neither itself
constructive otherwise nor exciting (in England), while the
192 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
century lasted, any philosophical construction of real and
permanent importance. (2) A rationalistic movement in
religion, prepared in the seventeenth century, and following
naturally from the principles of Protestantism, at first pro-
moted by the influence of the current philosophical ideas, yet
in the end suppressed by the advance of philosophical opinion,
or changed into a historical investigation of the external
evidences for a supernatural revelation. (3) A movement to
find a rational ground for moral action, by way of supplement
to the weakened force of the theological sanction, or as a
substitute for it when altogether rejected. (4) A corre-
sponding movement, less earnestly maintained, to explain on
rational principles the social and political relations subsisting
between men, upon the decay of the notion of supernatural
ordinance. (5) Within this last movement, a special deter-
mination towards economic inquiry. (6) Finally, a varied
literary movement, at first reflecting very faithfully the
dominant philosophical and religious conceptions, but after-
wards, as these became effete without begetting others,
opening out into new lines of sentiment which anticipated
the rational thought and inquiry of the coming time.
It is not possible, in short compass, to do anything like
justice to the working out of so comprehensive a scheme as
this of Mr. Stephen's, but as the philosophical and ethical
movements, which are of special interest to the readers of
this journal, happen to be rather compendiously treated, we
may look a little more closely at his view of these.
The dogmatic philosophy which the ' English Criticism '
broke down was the metaphysical system inaugurated by
Descartes, and, according to Mr. Stephen (though the point
is never very clearly established and is more than doubtful),
the same system, with its abstract assumptions and deductive
method, dominated the minds of the chief English rationalists
in religion, whether orthodox or deistical. He therefore
begins with a short account of the Cartesian philosophy. He
makes no reference to Bacon, and but incidental reference to
Hobbes, the great English thinkers of the seventeenth century,
and this may appear strange ; yet there is reason for the omis-
sion. Bacon and Hobbes were, each in his generation and in
his own way, true representatives of the English spirit in
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 193
philosophy, but it was not till Locke abandoned any such
attempt as either of theirs to construct an objective system
of universal knowledge, and threw himself upon a critical
investigation of the mind's powers, that England joined
properly in the modern philosophical movement of Europe.
It is true that Descartes himself, the great leader of the
movement, had sought, from his philosophical starting-point,
to work out also an explanation of the concrete phenomena
of nature. Before the end of the seventeenth century, however,
the attempt was practically discredited by the advance of
positive physical science from the time of Galileo ; and Locke
showed a true appreciation of the Zeitgeist, when, in an age that
produced " such masters as the great Huy genius and the
incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain,"
he thought it " ambition enough to be employed as an under-
labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some
of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge". In words
of too great modesty, we have here from Locke himself a
statement of the true work of philosophy in modern times,
and we see how in him English philosophical thought comes
into relation with the general European movement which,
however diverted by this or that speculative genius, has
always been directed to the fundamental inquiry as to the
ground and limits of knowledge. In particular, the Cartesian
philosophy was an attempt to found certainty of knowledge
upon the immediate deliverances of adult consciousness,
without consideration of the sources and development of
knowledge, and in respect of method sought to proceed by
way of rational deduction in constructing a fabric of meta-
physical doctrine. This was exactly what Locke set himself
from the very foundation to oppose. That the question of the
validity and limits of knowledge must depend upon an inquiry
into its origin and development was his deepest philosophical
conviction ; and though, as Mr. Stephen well points out, he
and his successors till Hume were really at one with the
Cartesians in restricting the inquiry to the consciousness of
the individual as known by introspection, and had not a
different conception of the meaning of real existence, yet the
difference of method could not but lead to very different
conclusions. How far Locke himself applied the critical
13
194 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
solvent to the system of dogmatic metaphysics, and how, with
diverse aims, it was further applied by Berkeley and Hume,
is clearly and vigorously set forth in general lines by Mr.
Stephen. The result was what we know — that rational
speculation by itself, apart from experience, was stripped of
all authority.
Mr. Stephen, having always more than an antiquarian
interest in his subject — being, in fact, for a historian, too
much rather than too little apt to sit in judgment, as well as
set forth and explain — is especially careful to consider the
attitude of Hume, so as to find a way out of the deadlock to
which the great doubter seemed to bring all human inquiry,
while shattering the system of speculative metaphysic. He
finds that Hume's point of view was essentially artificial ; that
he did not think of the mind of the individual in its true
relation to the social organism — as moulded by influences
quite different from the disjointed and haphazard sense-
impressions out of which he supposed the whole fabric of
intellectual consciousness had ever anew to be reared by and
for each person ; that he had 110 historical sense, much less a
glimmer of that scientific notion of the evolution of all organic
life which since then has so profoundly affected the work of
philosophical interpretation. The criticism, though not very
elaborate, is, as far as it goes, admirably conducted, and is an
attempt of a kind that has been too seldom made by sym-
pathisers with Hume's philosophical spirit to maintain it
intelligently in the altered state of human knowledge since
his time. As such, Mr. Stephen's judgment deserves the
attention of those champions of a different philosophy who
seem to think that a textual sifting of the writings of Locke
and Hume, revealing manifold inconsistencies and defects of
thought, is the most effective way of dealing a death-blow to
the cause of Experientialism at the present day. But — in
exhibiting Hume as the hero of a philosophic movement,
which effectually accomplished a work of destruction, yet did
it from principles which could lead to no constructive result,
so that only after a long lapse of years and by means of varied
research in history and special science was there gradually
formed, in these latter days, something like an adequate
experiential philosophy — Mr. Stephen has not given sufficient
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 195
prominence to one very marked phase of English intellectual
inquiry in the eighteenth century, and has thus been led to do
some injustice, if not to Hume's predecessors, at least to his
contemporaries and successors within the century. Psychol-
ogy, if it is viewed as science, has yet an exceptional standing
in relation to philosophy, and cannot be neglected in a history
of philosophic thought in England, where it has been so
steadily cultivated without being too carefully discriminated
from philosophy proper. Now Mr. Stephen, in his exposition,
nowhere gives much attention to the progress of psychology,
though this was very remarkable within the century ; and
hence he fails to assign due importance to one in particular of
Hume's contemporaries — David Hartley. His somewhat
disparaging estimate of Reid, in the last generation of the
century, might also have been relieved by an allowance of
serious purpose as a psychological inquirer to one who him-
self achieved something, and moved others to achieve more.
It should be well understood that Locke's work, the begin-
ning of all that followed in England, had two sides, which,
however related to one another, maybe clearly distinguished,
and were in fact the occasion of two different lines of
development in English thought. Essentially a philosopher
in his concern for the general problem of knowledge, he sought
for the solution of it in a psychological spirit, and he was the
first who expressly took up this position. He differed from
his predecessors, not only in his philosophical conclusion,
but from all of them — even his own countryman Hobbes —
in putting forward the psychological question of the growth
of knowledge as the first to be answered. And however
undeveloped his own psychology was, it soon appeared from
what followed how effectively he had given an impulse to new
inquiry. Berkeley did not only philosophise after the manner
of Locke, showing, with the special theological purpose that
moved him, how all knowledge was based on experience, and
that no experience could be assigned portending an absolute
existence of matter : he began in his New Theory of Vision the
work of special psychological investigation after the manner
of positive science. Even Hume, though his lasting import-
ance consists in his properly philosophical activity, set out at
the beginning with the distinctly psychological aim of found-
196 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
ing a " science of man " on " experience and observation "
like " the other sciences," or, as he also expressed it, of
making an "application of experimental philosophy to moral
subjects," as it had already been made to physical nature.
Now what Hume thus professed to do, but diverging into the
critico-philosophical vein left for the most part undone, this
Hartley expressly essayed and carried through, however he
may have also sought to combine therewith an extraneous
(ethical and religious) purpose ; and he did it as following
out the work of Locke in the spirit of Newton. If Locke,
Berkeley and Hume are a series representing the natural
development of English philosophical thinking at the time,
Locke, Berkeley and Hartley are another series representing
a movement of psychological inquiry then begun and destined
to become ever broader and deeper. And the second series
is certainly not the least important when we look beyond the
century to what followed. The most characteristic English
work of the later time has been done in the track of Hartley
rather than of Hume. This is true even of the work, not
psychological, of the younger Mill, who, though he presented
as a logical theory of positive science a doctrine allied to
Hume's negative philosophy, did not borrow it from Hume,
but rather worked it out independently as the proper philo-
sophical complement to the psychology of Hartley and his
father, Hartley's close adherent. It is still more true of the
psychological work of the so-called Associationists, James
Mill and his successors, whether of the straiter sect of in-
dividualists, or of the broader persuasion inspired with the
doctrine of evolution. The note of English psychology
thus far has been the study of mental phenomena in relation
with physiological conditions (wherever these can be made
manifest), and this without express metaphysical assumption,
or even to the exclusion of metaphysical assumption, as in
the positive sciences generally, whose advance has depended
on their being thus pursued. To Hartley, more than any
other, it is due that the science of mind has been brought (on
the side on which it can be brought) into relation with
physiology, and it is too little recognised with what extra-
ordinary insight he anticipated some of the most important
results now established in physiological psychology ; while, if
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 197
it cannot be equally said that he steered clear of metaphysical
assumptions at the beginning, it may be affirmed that his
positive doctrine of mental acquisition is developed without
the least reference to them. To speak of him as Mr. Stephen
does, as a materialist, because he takes account of physical
conditions throughout, is no more fitting than it would be to
use the same term of any scientific psychologist of the present
time ; or, if he is so described because he supposed the con-
sciousness of the individual to result wholly from a grouping
of incidental experiences, the term is no more applicable to
him than to Locke. Curiously incoherent as are the parts of
his general philosophic system (if philosophic it can be called),
his psychology stands as one of the most remarkable in-
tellectual productions of the eighteenth century, destined
later, if not at the time, to have the deepest influence upon
' English Thought '.
Passing now to the Moralists, we find Mr. Stephen's
exposition guided by one main conception. So long, he
maintains, as theology was a vital belief in the world and
preserved a sufficient infusion of the anthropomorphic
element, it affor.ded a complete and satisfactory answer to
the common questions of ethics — what is meant by ' ought '
and 'goodness' and what are the motives that induce us to
be good. Nor did the inquiry into the nature of our moral
sentiments naturally suggest itself ; the only moral inquiry
likely to flourish was casuistry, or the discussion as to the
details of that legal code whose origin and sanctions were
abundantly clear. But wider speculations as to morality
inevitably occurred as soon as the vision of God became faint.
It was growing faint in the seventeenth century when Hobbes
could venture to put the bold questions he did. It had
become so faint in the eighteenth century that men stood in
face of a strictly practical issue : How was morality to survive
theology ? Hence the outburst of ethical inquiry by such a
multitude of thinkers. Mr. Stephen ranges them under
three main heads : (1) the Intellectual School of Clarke,
Wollaston and Price ; (2) the Common Sense School of
Butler, Hutcheson and Beid ; (3) the Utilitarian School,
founded on Locke and comprehending such different repre-
sentatives as Hume, Waterland, Tucker and Paley. Shaftes-
198 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
bury and Mandeville are at the same time treated incidentally
at considerable length, as representing extreme phases of the
recoil from the abstract metaphysics of the intellectualists ;
and a separate section is further given to Hartley and Adam
Smith, because of their different attempts to trace the psy-
chological genesis or derivation of the moral faculty in man.
In these ethical sections, Mr. Stephen never loses his hold
upon the reader's attention, and not seldom he appears,
perhaps, at his best both as a writer and as a philosophical
critic. Especially when he has to deal with Hume, the
exposition becomes masterly, and there is a very striking
argument against looking for the root of morality in such an
individualistic psychology as that beyond which all Hume's
acuteness never carried him. Mr. Stephen's way of putting
the alternative position is to say that the ethical problem
cannot be solved except on the basis of a scientific sociology,
but, whether called sociology or a truer psychology that
refuses to look at the mental development of the individual
apart from the social medium into which he is born, the basis is
that which must be chosen by any clear-sighted experientialist
at the present day. After Hume, the thinker who here as a
moralist, or elsewhere as a philosophic theologian, receives
most worthy appreciation from Mr. Stephen, is Butler. The
serious, not to say sombre, mood of the man, oppressed with
a sense of the dire reality of existence in an optimistic age,
strikes a sympathetic chord in the mind of his critic, and
evokes a response whose strength is hardly weakened by
their speculative difference of opinion as to the supernatural.
Of Mr. Stephen's other estimates, that of Samuel Clarke is
among the most successful. Like Butler, Clarke falls to be
treated at two places in his different characters of theologian
and moralist, and both must be consulted for the judgment of
him in either capacity. Mr. Stephen compares him, by a very
happy "inspiration, to another famous Cambridge doctor,
better known in these days but not more prominent, as an
intellectual figure than Clarke was in his time — namely,
Whewell. Clarke's distinction, while bred under English
conditions and holding in great part by native authorities
in science and philosophy, was that he had drunk also at
foreign springs, and knew at once how far it became an
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 199
English theologian to go with outlandish speculative philo-
sophers and when it was necessary to stop or even to lift up
his voice against their wayward aberrations. Mr. Stephen
rather overstates his dependence on Descartes, or overlooks
his dependence on Newton and his relation to Locke. There
is also some want of precision in the passage referred to (vol.
i. p. 119), where Leibniz is specially named as the thinker
to whom Clarke stood " in the same sort of relation which
Whewell occupied to modern German philosophers " (mean-
ing Kant). But, all the same, the comparison remains a
very felicitous one, and the remark which follows, that " in
softening the foreign doctrines to suit English tastes he
succeeds in enervating them without making them substanti-
ally more reasonable," while throwing a real light upon
Clarke, is a good instance of Mr. Stephen's power, displayed
throughout his volumes, of dropping observations that strike
home in regard to thinkers not so far removed as those
of the eighteenth century.
However, as a history of ethical speculation in England at
the time, Mr. Stephen's review of the moralists strikes one
as defective in several ways. No explanation is offered of
the remarkable fact that the philosophical activity of the
English mind was directed so predominantly into the
line of ethical speculation, not slackening here even when
about the middle of the century intellectual speculation was
struck with sudden collapse. The review is also too abruptly
ended and is more abruptly begun ; in particular, no attempt
being made at the beginning to show the relation in which
the different ethical efforts of the eighteenth century stood
to earlier English efforts in the seventeenth. Again by class-
ing together under the one head of ' Utilitarians,' moralists
so different as Hume on the one hand, and Locke, Waterland,
Tucker and Paley on the other, the common prejudice against
Utilitarianism, as. if it were a system of selfishness, tends to
be confirmed. And the principle itself which guides the whole
exposition — that the philosophical inquiry into the grounds
of right action was determined by the weakening of the reli-
gious sanction — seems to come short of expressing the facts,
both first and last, or even is rather obviously at variance
with some of them.
200 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The strong point of the English mind in theoretical
philosophy, as Mr. Stephen remarks early in his work, is its
vigorous grasp of facts, its weakness is its comparative
indifference to logical symmetry. Not less characteristic has
been the English habit of thinking always with some view to
practice, and making the theory of practice its chief philoso-
phical concern. Far back in the days of the Middle Age,
when the Church drew to itself the intellectual service of all
the western peoples, and there was but one philosophy —
Christian and European, the national tendency above all
things to moralise already betrayed itself in English School-
men like John of Salisbury, and Koger Bacon anticipated
that conception of knowledge as subservient to human practice
which another Bacon is supposed to have first disclosed to
the world.1 The later utterance by Francis Bacon, coincid-
ing with the beginning of the modern era of philosophical
thought when the nations each went their own way, was
indeed so peculiarly impressive that his countrymen are not
unnaturally thought to have been ever since bound by its
spell ; but it is nearer the truth to see in the great preacher
of Induction only the representative for the time of the
national habit of thinking. Hobbes, who owed nothing to
Bacon, and took nothing from him, was not less practically
minded in his deductive speculations, having never absent
from his view the regulation of human conduct in society
even when dealing with the most general aspects of know-
ledge. Nor was Locke, who owed no more to Hobbes than
Hobbes to Bacon, but with sturdy originality worked out his
inquiry into human knowledge as an English counterpiece
to the Cartesian philosophy reigning abroad, a whit behind
either in his recognition of morality as " the proper science
and business of mankind in general," while the useful arts
should be the concern of special experts in default of a
" scientifical knowledge " of nature not to be attained by
human faculties. Berkeley, again, speculated with a moral
or religious, at all events a directly practical, object in view ;
and Hume's Moral Philosophy remains the most serious, as
1 The relation of the later to -the earlier Bacon is shortly .but effectively
indicated in the introductory Lecture delivered by Prof. Adamson at
Owens College in October last : Roger Bacon ; the Philosophy of Science in
the Middle Ages (Manchester: Cornish, 1876).
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 201
by himself it was the most cherished, of his achievements.
What a moralising vein pervades the general literature of
our country, to the sacrifice of artistic aim, has not seldom
been remarked, though it has never been more forcibly
exhibited than by Mr. Stephen himself in describing the
literary activity proper of the period. It is intelligible, then,
or at least it is not surprising, how varied and constantly
renewed should have been the attempts by English thinkers
of the eighteenth century, smaller as well as greater, to
determine the reason and aims of human conduct, and how
they should have been continued at a time when abstract
metaphysical inquiry became paralysed ; more especially
since the psychological impulse, which has told so markedly
on the development of ethical thought in England, went on
as we have seen steadily gathering strength, unaffected if
not reinforced by the circumstances of the philosophical
dead-block.
With such a determination of the English mind towards
practical philosophy, even as exhibited in the eighteenth cen-
tury only, it is in any case hardly to be expected that then for
the first time ethical inquiry should all of a sudden begin ; and
yet this, it must be said, is the rather misleading impression
given by Mr. Stephen's chapter on the moralists. It is true
he alludes at starting to Hobbes's bold speculations on
morality launched in the middle of the previous century, but
he does not suggest, as in the interest of historical under-
standing he might even have impressed, the fact that some
of the most characteristic ethical positions of the later time
were already taken up at the earlier. For example, the so-
called Intellectual School of Clarke, Wollaston, and Price
(of which, by the way, the shortcomings are much more
effectively exposed than its serious scientific import is
acknowledged) is treated without any reference to Cudworth ;
though Cudworth, besides enunciating all the most dis-
tinctive doctrines of the school — as Price, by borrowing
wholesale from him rather than from Clarke, allows — was
the author even of the "magniloquent trick of language
about tbfi eternal and immutable nature of things " which
Mr. Stephen declares to be the sole relic that survived its
decay. It is also a real omission, in tracing the origin of
202 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Utilitarianism, whether in its stricter sense or in the looser
sense of Hedonism adopted in the heading of Mr. Stephen's
section, to make no reference to Cumberland, who has been
not untruly described as the first philosophical moralist that
appeared in this country, and who certainly did (to whatever
dreary extent) reason about the grounds of human conduct
in the spirit considered most essentially English. If a period
is to be understood historically, it must not be taken too
strictly, at least a parte prce ; and unfortunately it is just in
dealing with the moral philosophers that Mr. Stephen
confines himself with exceptional rigour to his century,
thereby not a little reducing the value of the very part of his
work that otherwise comes nearest to fulfilling the conditions
of a history of philosophical thought.
It is impossible also not to regret the confusion caused
by classing under the one head of Utilitarianism all those
moralists who in any way make the rule of right dependent
on the promotion of happiness. Of course, this use of the
term may be justified, because, in strictness, it applies
equally to the selfish pursuit of one's own happiness and to
the conscious regard for the good of all ; but nobody knows
better than Mr. Stephen, or indeed has better set forth on
the whole, the distinctive character of that ethical view
which was lifted at once into importance by the genius of
Hume, and has later become so identified with the English
name in practical philosophy. Neither in a theoretic nor in
any other point of view is justice done to Hume's serious
attempt to find a rational explanation of morality when he
is ranked with theological moralists like Waterland, who
solves all difficulties by direct resort to the supernatural
sanction, or even with Locke, who in a more round-about
and uncertain way has recourse to the same constraining
authority. How greatly concerned Hume was to prove the
natural existence in man of altruistic sentiments is so clearly
apprehended and plainly set forth by Mr. Stephen, that from
him at least we have a right to expect no such indiscriminate
classing as may tend to obscure the most fundamental
distinction. Not only, however, is the loose classification
made, but, in his eagerness to show how much better the
system of altruistic (but dependent) morality can now be
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 203
based, we find Mr. Stephen carried to the length of com-
mitting an injustice. When he says that " later writers of
the Benthamist school generally show a reluctance, as did
Bentham himself, to admit the possibility of a perfectly
disinterested emotion " (ii. p. 105), he says what it would be
difficult to make good of any later utilitarian of philosophical
standing. And speaking of Bentham, it is surely by an
arbitrary exclusion that the author of the Principles of Morals
and Legislation (written before the year 1780) is referred to
the present century. Though there is truth in the remark
that "the history of Utilitarianism, as an active force,"
belongs to the nineteenth century, at least as regards civil
legislation, yet nothing is more characteristic of the history
of English thought in the eighteenth century, than that in
the last generation of it there should have been formulated
those principles of public arid private right of which so
revolutionary an application was destined in time to be
made. Nor if it should be granted that Beritham's utili-
tarianism, as an attempt to base morality upon observation,
reduces it " to a mere chaos of empirical doctrines," as much
as Hume's, is this anything but a reason for associating it
with the work of the eighteenth century. There would be
more reason, indeed, from Mr. Stephen's point of view, in
referring even the younger Mill to the eighteenth, than in
taking the opposite course with his great master in politics
and morals.
A few remarks, in conclusion, seemed called for on that
conception which, if it can hardly be said in fact to guide,
yet stands in the front of Mr. Stephen's treatment of the
moral philosophers. Were the manifold ethical theories
that sprang up in the century all so many attempts to find
a secular rule of human conduct in default of the decayed
or decaying influence of theological precepts ? The notion
undoubtedly fits some of the facts and involves a general
truth. Ethics, so prominent a department of the ancient
philosophical systems, was of all the more obvious subjects
of rational speculation the least cultivated when, after the
long centuries of faith without thinking, the Christian
doctors of the Middle Age began to think about their faith.
Not that the practical rule of life was made a matter of no
204 ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
concern ; but it had been provided so expressly by super-
natural authority that there could be no question except as
to how it should be applied in the varying circumstances of
the human lot. Hence all such reasoning as there was
about human conduct assumed the form and the name of
Moral Theology, while the complementary doctrine of Natu-
ral Theology was but a part, however large, of the theoretic
philosophy of the time. Theology stood for the whole of
practical philosophy ; and thus in no direction — not even
that of positive physical science — could the modern spirit,
when it awoke, break away more decisively from the
bondage of scholasticism than by entering on the path of
ethical inquiry. Every great ethical system that has since
been given to the world has truly been an attempt to find a
strictly rational law of conduct. Such were the systems of
Spinoza and Kant, and such also was the system of Hume.
Such even, as Mr. Stephen might fairly contend, was the
character of some of the minor ethical doctrines which he
passes under review. But hardly will his reader carry away
the impression that the English moralists of the eighteenth
century generally had reached the stage of philosophical
detachment from the old theological basis. Had the " vision
of God " become faint in Butler — Butler to whom conscience
was truly the voice of a supernatural judge, and whose
psychology was the controversial buttress of his ethics rather
than its philosophical foundation? Was Clarke the less a
Schoolman in spirit because he lived in the days of Newton,
and affected the form of scientific demonstration ? Or was
Paley satisfied that the truth should be told without the fear
of hell and the hope of heaven? Mr. Stephen must drop
out of view all but two or three of his English moralists
before he can see in the eighteenth century the clear begin-
nings of that determined search for a naturalistic ground of
ethics which is being pursued in the nineteenth, but not
even now is admitted without protest and resistance.
The truth, perhaps, is that Mr. Stephen, who is always as
much a critic as an historian and, what is more, a critical
thinker anxiously concerned about the speculative issues of
his own time, has been somewhat over-ready to see the
present in the past, and to reckon with the long departed as
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 205
if they were adversaries or allies. This fault, if it is one,
he can best expiate by writing another work, that not only
will give better scope for the exercise of his special faculty
but will be the more valuable according as he gives it free
play and does not scruple, while tracing the currents of
opinion, to direct them to the utmost of his power. Let
him give us that critical History of English Thought in the
Nineteenth Century which the very defects as well as the
excellences of his present volumes mark him out as signally
able to essay.
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.1
UNDEE this title Mr. Lewes, in his new volume,2 passes
from the general part of his philosophical task to deal with
the more special ' Problems of Life and Mind,' and delivers
himself on various questions that have lately engrossed much
attention. Prominent among these is the question of so-
called Animal Automatism, and it is proposed in the
following pages to offer some remarks on the subject after
considering his handling of it ; but first it is necessary, as
well as due to Mr. Lewes, to take account of other parts of
the volume, which contain the results of long-protracted
inquiry.
In this country at least, Mr. Lewes holds an almost
unique position. He is a philosophical thinker and psycho-
logical inquirer who is also a practical worker in physiology ;
or he is a physiologist whose positive investigations of the
innermost phenomena of organic life are guided by trained
psychological insight and an ever-present regard to philoso-
phical principles. In either aspect of it, his activity is of
prime interest to all who at this present time are concerned
about the problems of Life and Mind. Physiological special-
ists, who naturally are every day more and more encroaching
on the psychological domain, may draw much enlightenment
from one who knows how to speak their language as well as
the other ; and psychologists, who have to endure many a
sneer for their readiness to eke out subjective observation
with second-hand objective discoveries, may repose special
confidence in a fellow-inquirer who accepts no physiological
results that he does not himself verify. Those parts, there-
fore, of his present volume where he appears most distinctly
1 Mind, iii. 24.
- The Physical Basis of Mind, with illustrations. Being the Second Series
of Problems of Life and Mind, by GEORGE HENRY LEWES. London:
Triibner & Co., 1877. (Vol. i. of the First Series, The Foundations of a
Creed, appeared in 1874, and vol. ii. in 1875.)
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 207
in his double character of physiologist and psychologist, or
prepares the way for assuming it, have the strongest claim
on our attention here. A short preliminary survey of the
volume will make plain what they are.
We have first a series of discussions on ' The Nature of
Life'. Since it is animal organisms that manifest mind, a
clear view of the distinctive character of vital organisation
is naturally the primary requisite for understanding that
special form of life which mind is. Towards the general
argument of his volume, Mr. Lewes here more especially
contends that no mechanical expression can ever adequately
represent the processes of life ; he also impresses, for use
later on, the very important distinction between Property
and Function which he had the credit, nearly twenty years
ago, of first bringing clearly into view in the physiological
science of the present generation. The consideration of
vital phenomena is then brought to a close in a long chapter
on Evolution, which aims at showing that a struggle for
existence is maintained not only among organisms but also
among their component tissues and organs, and that the
unity of type in organisms is rather to be explained by all-
pervading laws of Organic Affinity than by Mr. Darwin's
supposition of Unity of Descent. The next section is con-
cerned with ' The Nervous Mechanism,' and contains much
destructive criticism of current scientific doctrines, followed
up by an exposition of such general notions of the structure
and action of the nervous system as the author believes can
be affirmed in the present imperfect state of knowledge.
Then follows, under the heading of ' Animal Automatism,'
a somewhat varied collection of dissertations — historical,
abstract, polemical — directed to the assertion of " the bio-
logical point of view" against a purely mechanical one in
treating of mind as related to the living organism. And
last, within the present volume, ' The Reflex Theory,' which
forms so great a part of the prevalent doctrine of neuro-
physiology, is subjected to an elaborate consideration from
the same " biological " point of view, taken as it had already
been by the author in regard to this particular question
when he wrote his well-known popular work The Physiology
of Common Life.
208 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
The last two "problems," while intimately connected,
arise naturally out of the "problem" of the Nervous
Mechanism as treated by Mr. Lewes, and must be ap-
proached through it. On the other hand, the preliminary dis-
cussion on the Nature of Life, if its general import is kept
in view later on, need not here detain us. Not the least
interesting portion, it may only be remarked in passing, is
that in which Mr. Lewes seeks to generalise the principle
of Natural Selection by extending it to the organised elements
of composite animal organisations ; as he had already some
years ago proposed to amend Mr. Darwin's theory in another
direction, namely, by supposing Natural Selection to proceed
upon an indefinite number of original protoplasts emerging
under similar conditions, instead of the four or five or even
one considered by Mr. Darwin himself at once necessary and
sufficient to account for all the variety of related organic
forms. Mr. Darwin, in reply to the earlier criticism, has
admitted (Origin of Species, 6th ed., p. 425) the possibility
that at the first commencement of life many different forms
were evolved, but thinks it may be concluded that in that
case only a very few have left modified descendants. One
would gladly learn his opinion of the extension now proposed
of his famous theory. Perhaps it may be guessed that he
would decline to load the theory with an application so
purely speculative, and not unreasonably, considering the
difficulty of its verification even within the original limits.
It cannot, however, be denied, in view of what is already
known of the composition of organisms from living elements,
that the question of the origin of species is but one aspect of
the general question as to the development of life, and Mr.
Lewes does good philosophical work when he raises it in
its full implication.
As regards the Nervous Mechanism, Mr. Lewes has long
been known to hold unfashionable opinions, which now at
last receive a formal expression. He confines himself for
the present, indeed, to the more general aspects of the
nervous system, reserving the question of the functions of
the brain till the physiological exposition can be accompanied
by the necessary survey of psychological processes ; but, as
it stands, his treatment is fraught with observations of deep
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 209
import to the psychologist. Mr. Lewes is persuaded that
a great part of the current doctrine, confidently propounded
by anatomists and physiologists and implicitly received by
too confiding psychological inquirers, is either wholly base-
less or at least not yet based on actual experience. An
imaginary anatomy makes fibres run into cells and cells
prolong themselves as fibres in a way that no eye has ever
seen, all because of a physiological prepossession as to the
part played by these particular elements in the nervous
system. It is by an over-simplification of the system that
these elements are singled out from the whole mass of it,
and the proper scientific task of analysis is again overdone
when division is arbitrarily made of the system into sides
and parts, which are credited with such diverse characters
in separation that it becomes impossible to understand how
they should form together a system the most coherent and
uniform that is. It is difficult not to allow the force' of Mr.
Lewes's objections against many of the most fundamental
positions in the reigning doctrine of neuro-physiology, a.nd
the vigour of his criticism, informed as it is by the practice
of original experimental work, bespeaks attention to the
doctrine (given in outline) which he would substitute, at
least provisionally, for the too definite teaching of the
schools. Some of his more characteristic views, not now
expressed for the first time, have indeed already begun to
modify the traditional dogma in the minds of younger
physiologists.
The key-note of his doctrine is the assertion of uniformity
of structural plan and mode of working in all parts of the
nervous system, high and low. This is not denied, or is even
affirmed, in so many words, by physiologists in general, but
they are apt to couple any such assertion with others which
to Mr. Lewes seem to rob it of all its significance — as, for
instance, that the action of the lower centres is purely
reflex or mechanical ; that the action of the higher centres
differs in being conscious action ; that particular nerve-cells
are sensory or motor, or even sensational, or ideational, or
emotional ; and the like. Not that he either pretends that
there is no distinction in the action of the different parts ;
there is undoubtedly the most marked difference of function
14
210 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
or use, according as the various collections of nervous ele-
ments, distinguished as particular nerves or centres, are
connected with different structures in the bodily organism.
But this circumstance only makes it the more vitally
important, for the comprehension of the system generally,
to signalise the fundamental identity of character pervading
all its parts, and this Mr. Lewes does by distinguishing
(after Bichat) Property from Function, and maintaining that
the elements of the system in all their variety, both as
elements and when aggregated, manifest everywhere one
perfectly characteristic property. This property he speaks
of under the two names of " Neurility " and " Sensibility,"
according as it is presented by the nervous lines brandling
out towards the periphery or by the parts distinguished as
central ; but, however named, we are to think of a purely
objective quality, symbolising a multitude of changes ex-
pressible ultimately only in terms of motion. Thus under-
stood, the conception undoubtedly helps to a clear under-
standing of the whole system of neural processes, which is
otherwise apt to be misconceived from the fact that our
conscious mental life is obviously related to some of the
processes rather than to others, or to some more than to
others. There is, besides, positive evidence that native
property survives functional appropriation in the well-known
facts, established by Vulpian and others, of function becom-
ing experimentally reversed ; and Mr. Lewes would even
suggest in one place (p. 282) that the same fibres which
carry impulse out to the muscles may transmit the muscular
reaction as a recurrent stimulus inwards to the centres — a
view which, if it could be maintained, would help to recon-
cile the notoriously opposite interpretations of the muscular
sense now prevalent. He also gives due prominence to all
the facts tending to show that nerve-fibres are not merely
passive carriers, and that the grey matter (for example, in
the spinal cord) performs the work of transmission as well
as any fibres.
Next to the fundamental uniformity of plan and process
throughout the nervous system, it is the actual coherence
and solidarity of its parts with unity of action that Mr.
Lewes is most concerned to establish against the exagger-
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 211
ated " analysis " of the common physiological view. He
objects to the distinction of peripheral and central parts as
artificial, protests against the opposition of sensation and
motion if taken to imply the independent arid unrelated
working of two sides in 'the nervous system, and seeks
above all to bring into relief the diffuse character which
nervous disturbance is prone to assume with the effect of
implicating the whole organism. He does not, of course,
overlook the salient feature of the nervous system known
as "isolated conduction," or forget how mental growth
through experience depends upon restriction of the original
" irradiation " ; but he is utterly sceptical as to the efficiency
of the medullary sheath which is commonly assigned as the
means of insulating the ultimate nerve-lines, while refusing,
in the present state of knowledge or ignorance, to hazard
any other explanation of the fact in as far as it occurs.
That it must not be asserted in any absolute sense, so as
to imply fixity or invariability of nervous conduction, he is
quite sure : " fluctuation," he is never tired of repeating, is
the characteristic at least of central combinations, and this,
he more than suggests, may be dependent on the presence
of a structural element for which no allowance has been
made in the current physiological theories, namely, the
so-called Neuroglia. According to some a kind of merely
connective tissue, affording mechanical support to the true
(fibrous and cellular) elements of the nervous system while
itself not neural, this "nerve-cement" seems to Mr. Lewes,
whether called neural or not, to play an essential part in all
the processes of the system and probably a more important
part than even the nerve-cells (p. 246). : In any case, until
the network of the Neuroglia is better understood and duly
taken into account, there can, he maintains, be no thought
of having a theory of the working of the nervous system
1 Wundt (PhyKi.nl. Pxj/c/Jo/o//7>, p. 29), after a short anatomical descrip-
tion of the Neuroglia in liis text, disposes of it physiologically in a foot-
note. He mentions that the body of it, while enclosing cells that are
clearly not nervous, has itself a constitution somewhat resembling the
protoplasmic contents of ganglionic cells, and that many ob-ervers
(Wagner, Henle, &c.) have thereby been induced to consider it as nervous
in character. But this view, he declares, is wholly at variance with all
that is known of the relations subsisting between the fundamental nerve-
elements, viz., the ganglionic cells and nerve-fibres.
212 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OP MIND.
satisfactorily based, as it should be, on the ground of ele-
mentary anatomy. Meanwhile Psychology, in the way of
objective help, must be content with such general know-
ledge as anatomy already affords of continuity and coherence
in the nervous system, and for a notion of the physical con-
ditions of mental life must rely rather upon the researches
of physiologists and pathologists.
The general representation of the working of the nervous
mechanism which Mr. Lewes accordingly proceeds to give
at the end of this part of his inquiry, strikes one as marked
by a happy mixture of boldness and circumspection. It is,
of course, only provisional as well as general, but the way
in which he manages, by a comparatively simple theory,
to order the chief facts and to suggest consistent explana-
tion of special difficulties, deserves warm acknowledgment.
Without following him into his formal expression of laws,
some notion may here be given of his view of nervous
action by quoting a passage that brings its main points into
relief through an apt and instructive simile : —
" Imagine all the nerve-centres to be a connected group of bells
varying in size. Every agitation of the connecting wire will more or less
agitate all the bells ; but since some are heavier than others and some
of the cranks less movable, there will be many vibrations of the wire
which will cause some bells to sound, others simply to oscillate without
sounding, and others not sensibly to oscillate. Even some of the lighter
bells will not ring if any external pressiire arrests them ; or if the ? are
already ringing, the added impulse, not being rhythmically timed, will
arrest the ringing. So the stimulus of a sensory nerve agitates its C' n',re,
and through it the whole system ; usually the stimulation is n aialy
reflected on the group of muscles innervated from that centre because
this is the readiest path of discharge ; but it sometimes does not mainly
discharge along this path, the line of least resistance lying in another
direction ; and the discharge never takes place without also irradiating
upwards and downwards through the central tissue. Thus irradiated, it
falls into the general stream of neural processes ; and according to the
state in which the various centres are at the moment it modifies their
activity " (p. 284).
A notable feature in this view is the treatment of Arrest
as but another aspect of Discharge, whereby he gets rid of
the complex machinery of inhibitory centres which has
become so troublesome in recent physiological theory ; but
instead of dwelling on this or any other of the interesting
questions raised by Mr. Lewes, it must suffice to direct the
attention of psychological students to the whole of this
closing chapter on the Laws of Nervous Activity, and we
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 213
may now pass to the third and fourth "problems". Thus
far Mr. Lewes has been treating the nervous system from
the anatomical and physiological point of view. Only in the
chapter where he introduces his use of the word Sensibility
to mark the common property of nerve-centres (as opposed
to the common property of peripheral nerves, which he calls
Neurility) is he led to refer to the subjective aspect of nerve-
processes which, he does not deny, is. unavoidably suggested
by the word. In spite of the ambiguity he deliberately
makes choice of it to designate the objective quality he has
in view, and he believes he has his reward in evading, with
it and its companion-term Neurility, the more seriously
confusing associations of the alternative name Nerve-force.
For the subjective aspect of Sensibility he proposes, or
rather at once claims as a matter of course, to use the word
" Sentience " ; and, though in the chapter itself he somewhat
curiously interchanges the words as if they meant not only
the same thing in different aspects (which he afterwards
seeks to prove) but quite the same (subjective) aspect of the
thing, yet, on the question of principle, he is most impressive
in his distinction of the two aspects, and, while indicating
as clearly as possible the respective tasks of physiologist and
psychologist in the matter, he confines himself in all the
remaining chapters of his second part strictly to the objective
view. In the last two parts of the volume, on the other
hand, it is the subjective phase of mind that is uppermost —
not indeed as viewed in itself by the introspective psycho-
logist but (in accordance with his main title) as that of
which the nervous mechanism is the " physical basis ".
The amount of controversial matter in these two parts
makes it somewhat difficult to take an orderly critical survey
of his positions. On the whole it seems best to work into
his meaning through the discussion of the Reflex Theory
which he himself takes last, 'keeping in view, where necessary,
the more general considerations ranged under the head of
Animal Automatism.
What is the precise import of the Reflex Theory as under-
stood by physiologists, who do not as a rule trouble them-
selves much about the full psychological implication of their
statements, — may be a matter of question ; but Mr. Lewes
214 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
takes pains to leave us in no doubt as to the counter-theory
which he, with his face distinctly set towards psychology,
would substitute for it. While the current theory seems
to him to assert dogmatically that the nervous processes in
lower centres may and do pass as purely physical (or, as
they are called, mechanical) changes without having any
psychical aspect whatever, he contends that every central
nervous process, to the very lowest and simplest, in any
organism, intact or truncated, that is not dead, has in and
for itself its proper psychical phase or aspect, as much as
the highest and most complex cerebral process accompanying
or accompanied by that which all understand as a conscious
experience. He does not say that the psychical state con-
comitant with the action of a lower centre is a conscious
state — either that the centre is itself endowed with con-
sciousness or that the man or animal is conscious in the
case ; as indeed, for that matter, he denies that the centres
immediately concerned in the higher cerebral process are in
themselves the seat of consciousness, or that the man or
animal need always be conscious in this case. But he
does assert that in the one case as well as the other there is,
besides the physical, a real psychical occurrence which is to
be understood in terms of "Feeling" or subjective ex-
perience. He commits himself, for example, to the general
statement that " Feeling is necessary for reflex action " (p.
435), meaning this at all events, that whenever and wherever
a central nervous process goes forward in a living organism
there always is present something that may be called Feeling.
His favourite expression, however, is that the centre has
Sensibility ; and, though he may have wished elsewhere to
understand by Sensibility a purely physical or objective
process — something wholly expressible in terms of matter
and motion — here, there can be no doubt, he means by
Sensibility a subjective condition as well. This is abun-
dantly clear when, in the course of his argument, he claims
for every active centre a power of Discrimination, Memory,
&c. ; or if it be said, as is sometimes half implied (p. 463),
that these terms may after all be understood objectively —
e.g., Discrimination as meaning only " neural grouping" —
cadit quaestio. No upholder of the Reflex Theory, even
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 215
in Mr. Lewes s statement of it, denies that the centres
perform a work of neural grouping, or that, as a plain matter
of objective fact, there does appear an " adaptation of the
mechanism to varying impulses ".
The theory he opposes has, according to Mr. Lewes, nothing
to rest on but a mere prejudice as to the brain alone being
the seat of sensation. When the actual facts observable in
animals (with or without brains) are fairly weighed, especially
in the light of what is known of the structure and laws of the
nervous system, the theory must give way to a truer repre-
sentation of the behaviour of the living organism. Presump-
tion against presumption, it is quite the opposite view that is
suggested by way of general deduction before looking at the
particular evidence. The nervous system, as we saw, has a
uniformity of structure and working everywhere, and is also
in the truest sense a coherent whole. In as far as it is
possible at all to speak of separate action of its parts (this or
that centre) in their natural state of union, the processes in all
of them appear exactly similar ; and, in fact, a process set up
anywhere may always implicate the whole system, and through
this the organism generally. A reaction of the general organ-
ism being the natural outcome of every stimulus, the particular
reaction that is at the moment possible for each, amid the
multitude of impressions always being received, will determine
the character it assumes subjectively. The same kind of
impression that at one time appears as a conscious state
specially attended to or distinctly felt, may at another time in
the crush of impressions not come into consciousness at all ;
but in being thus unconscious, it does not cease to be sub-
jectively— it does not lapse out of the domain of Feeling, for
at any moment it may again acquire the character of a
conscious sensation, if the brain is not otherwise engrossed.
So, if the brain is removed altogether without loss of life, we
are not to suppose that such reaction as is still possible in the
organism has no longer any psychical character, merely because
it can no longer appear as it did to the animal that was
conscious through the brain. Indeed, if we turn to the
actual facts, " instead of marvelling at the disappearance of so
many modes of sensibility when the brain is removed, our
surprise should rather be to find so many evidences of
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
sensibility after so profound a mutilation of the organism "
(p. 439). The facts warrant, according to Mr. Lewes —
especially those placed under the head of Instinct (pp. 463 ff.)
— precisely the same kind of inference as is forced upon an
observer by the deportment of animals in their intact state.
With Pfluger, he urges that it is only by inference from
objective signs that we ascribe subjective life to any other
man or animal, and where the signs, though in the absence
of the brain, remain precisely what they were, the inference
is not to be evaded.
There is no need to follow Mr. Lewes into his interpreta-
tion of the facts, as far as he adduces them, in detail. The
point of real significance is to understand the general reason
why Sensibility in its full meaning — not as mere " Neural
grouping " — should be so expressly claimed for the spinal
cord. Or it may be said that everything depends on the use
to be made of the concession, supposing it were not with-
held ; for if it is true that the claim can never be proved, it
is equally true that it admits of no positive disproof. First,
however, we must seek out the true meaning of the Reflex
Theory, to see what is the real difference that separates Mr.
Lewes and its upholders.
The Reflex Theory, though often enunciated in an in-
cautious or in a half-hearted way, is at bottom nothing but
an assertion that, wherever there is nervous stimulation
followed by nervous outcome (appearing as movement or
otherwise), there is a continuous physical process through
the central parts involved, and no hyperphysical or meta-
physical agency is to be assumed there for the explanation
of the forthcoming result. When first formulated, the
statement was confined to the lower centres, but this may
have been rather because the processes in these were simple
and could be approximately traced than because the cerebral
processes were believed to be disparate in kind, that is to
say, physically discontinuous, by reason of the intervention
of a non-physical agent (the conscious ego) at the higher
centres. Or, if indeed some, nay many, assertors of the
Reflex Theory have limited it to the spinal column and more
immediately connected parts, under some such notion (more
or less vaguely expressed) of a difference of conditions in the
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. '217
brain, this is a weakness or misunderstanding which clearer
heads have been able to surmount with the gradual advance
of physiological knowledge. The doctrine of Animal Autom-
atism, as Mr. Lewes himself remarks (p. 389), is only the
Reflex Theory legitimately carried out ; at least, it includes
the assertion that all central nervous processes whatever,
high as well as low, are physically continuous — that the
" nervous arc " is unbroken in the brain just as in the cord.
When, therefore, Mr. Lewes urges elsewhere (p. 453), as one
objection against the Reflex Theory, that there are cerebral
reflexes as well as spinal reflexes, he urges that which
consistent supporters of it are themselves most forward to
maintain. He does not differ from them seriously even
when he would urge that, as cerebral processes in another
aspect of them are mental processes, so some kind of mental
process may always be assumed as the obverse aspect of
a spinal reflex : they do not assert this, but neither do they
deny it as a matter of fact in what they do assert. He
differs from them radically only if he maintains that Reflex
Action is made what it is through the agency of Feeling —
that " Feeling is necessary "for Reflex Action " in the sense
that without the presence or interposition of feeling reflex
action cannot be conceived as proceeding.
Now it is impossible to doubt that this or something very
like it is Mr. Lewes's meaning, and that he evidently thinks
he thereby makes a distinct advance towards a scientific
comprehension of Mind. This is the object he has in view
throughout his whole argument, and not the gratification of
any mere fancy for harmonious philosophical expression.
Others have indulged in speculation as to an unconscious
mental life bound up with the action of the spinal cord, and,
not stopping there, have interpreted in an analogous manner
the vital processes in plants and completed their philo-
sophical sweep by supposing every change or motion in the
physical world to be in some shadowy fashion the direct
manifestation of a mind or mental principle. Mr. Lewes
does not go so far a-field. He founds no argument on the
so-called sensitiveness of plants, to say nothing of simpler
physical processes ; he does not assert that wherever the
property of Neurility is manifested, as in detached portions
'218 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
of nerve, there we must also assume the presence of some
sort of subjective feeling ; nay, even when there is distinct
" neural grouping," and thus evidence of the objective pro-
perty of Sensibility, as when the cheek of a guillotined
victim responds with blushing to a stroke, he scouts the
notion of the blow being felt (p. 439). But wherever there
is an animal organism, either living as it naturally lives or,
however mutilated, able to retain life, all its central actions,
he maintains, are what they are — actions of a living thing
and not motions of a dead mechanism — only by virtue of
Feeling, and if not first viewed as felt they are wholly
unintelligible.
What, then, is the precise difference between a Living
Organism — at least an animal organism with a nervous
system — and a mere Mechanism or Machine, which renders
it necessary to assume feeling as the ground of all action in
the former? This is a critical question which Mr. Lewes
raises over and over again within his volume, and strives to
answer in the most determinate way. His answer always
turns more or less upon the point that an organism is
peculiar in showing selective adaptation in all its acts, that
is, varying combination of motor impulses to suit the
varying requirements of the effect to be at any time pro-
duced, or, as he also puts it, fluctuating combination of
elements in response to variations of stimuli. This, he
holds, is found in no machine ; nor has a machine either
that primary constitution, distinctive of organisms, which
appears as their inherited specific nature, or a history, in
the sense of having its primitive adjustments modifiable
through development of structure brought to pass by the
very fact of its working experience. Otherwise, in his many
discussions of the subject, he urges that, however organisms
may exhibit phenomena referable to physical and chemical
agencies, they also exhibit others that can never be ex-
pressed in terms of these ; and, again, that the organism is
no mere mechanism, because mechanics can assign only the
abstract laws of its movements, and cannot account for its
behaviour in the concrete.
The statements may pass for what they are worth ; but
even if they were unexceptionable — which the last, for
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 219
example, hardly is, since mechanics gives no more than the
abstract laws of the motion of any body whatever — they yet
fail to prove anything as to the efficacy of Feeling in organic
processes. It is accordingly by another line of argument*
that Mr. Lewes really seeks to establish his general position.
He does not so much build any conclusion on the short-
comings of the Reflex Theory, as reject this because he has
already satisfied himself that where conscious feeling is
allowed by all to be present, it determines the nervous
processes to be what they are in the living organism. Here,
then, we turn expressly to his view of the doctrine of
Animal Automatism. An outgrowth (in its recent statement
at least) from the Reflex Theory, it may perhaps be so over-
thrown as to uproot the Reflex Theory with it. Its central
idea, now become familiar to all, is that consciousness,
although present, does not count for anything in the vital
history of man or animal — that all animal actions may be
completely expressed and accounted for in terms of (nervous)
matter and motion without the interposition of feeling as a
factor at any point of the course and indeed without any
reference whatever to conscious experience. Supposing this
were true, there is obviously a very intelligible sense in
which it can be said that everything proceeds mechanically
in the living organism : not that there is no difference
between a biological process and a simple physical move-
ment, any more than there is no difference between a
chemical reaction and the rebound of a ball, but in the sense
that just as a chemical process can and must always be
interpreted ultimately in terms of motion, so a nervous
event must likewise in the end be so interpreted. Be this
point of expression, however, as it may, Mr. Lewes is by no
means disposed to grant the main position. He contests
the ground inch by inch with Professor Huxley who some
years ago gave an impressive exposition of the doctrine of •
Automatism, and, what is more, he enters upon a line of
consideration which not only, as it seems to him, affords
the deepest reason for asserting Feeling to be an agent in
the vital procedure of man or animal, but also yields a
strictly psychological solution of the general question of the
relation between Body and Mind.
220 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
As a metaphysician, Mr. Lewes is a monist who declares
that objective Motion and subjective Feeling are but two
aspects of one and the same real, but he confesses that he
did not always clearly see how a physical process could also
be a psychical process. Even now, in a chapter (on Body
and Mind) that is otherwise marked by great insight and
subtlety of expression, there is some want of clearness or
consistency in the explanation that is offered ; but his
general drift is unmistakable and is to the effect that what
we call Matter and Mind, Object and Subject, are symbols
of different modes of feeling or sentience, which may both
represent the same real, just as one tuning-fork may appear
moving to the eye and sounding to the ear. The two differ
merely in the mode of apprehension. Still, they do differ,
and nobody could more impressively urge than does Mr.
Lewes in this chapter (see especially p. 342, as at the earlier
stage before referred to, p. 193), that there must be no
mixing-up of the different aspects — that when we are talking
in terms of Matter and Motion, i.e., " optico-tactical experi-
ences accompanied by muscular experiences," we must not
shift about and pass over into the phase of specially sub-
jective experience for which the comprehensive symbol is
Mind, nor vice versa. Thus, if by positing only a difference
of psychological aspects, not a difference of substances, he is
not saddled with the metaphysical difficulties of Dualism, he
also, by taking the different aspects as equally independent,
avoids the error of those who are prone to sacrifice the
subjective to the objective aspect, speaking of the terms of
the physical series as the causes of the corresponding psychi-
cal terms in a sense which does not admit of being reversed
— as if, that is to say, the one were always to be absolutely
assumed, while the other may be considered or neglected at
will. And yet he is perfectly aware of the special scientific
advantage there is in seeking for an objective expression of
the facts of subjective experience, which, though it never
should be declared a mere accident of the series of physio-
logical processes, does yet, as subjective, not admit of the
same rigour of scientific statement.
This, then, is the argument, and so far it might seem
intended for the rescue of Feeling from the subordinate
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 2*21
position to which it has too often been improperly consigned,
and the establishment of a thorough-going parallelism of the
physical and psychical ; but now we have to learn that Mr.
Lewes's real meaning is very different. Because the objec-
tive series of nervous processes and the subjective series
of corresponding mental states may both, in ultimate
psychological analysis, be regarded as modes of feeling in
some consciousness or other, this is to be a reason for
declaring that Feeling — meaning always a mental state in
the subjective series — may and does enter as a term into the
objective series, which, as properly objective, consists of
molecular movements in nerve. Let the reader, in particular,
refer to p. 403, where, after his long combat with Prof.
Huxley, Mr. Lewes proceeds to sum up his argument on the
special question of so-called Automatism. There we are
reminded once again that, though we may believe Conscious-
ness, which is a purely subjective process, to be objectively
a neural process, we are nevertheless passing out of the
region of physiology when we speak of Feeling determining
Action : motion may determine motion, but feeling can only
determine feeling. Yet we do, says Mr. Lewes, speak of
Feeling determining Action, and we " are justified : for
thereby we implicitly declare what Psychology explicitly
teaches, namely, that these two widely different aspects,
objective and subjective, are but the two faces of one and
the same reality. It is thus indifferent whether we say a
sensation is a neural process or a mental process — a mole-
cular change in the nervous system or a change in Feeling.
It is either and it is both." Certainly, it is here made clear
why Mr. Lewes has previously permitted himself to use the
same word Sensibility to express the objective fact of neural
grouping and also a fact of subjective experience ; but with
what reason he denounces those who, when they are
speaking in terms of matter and motion, cannot keep to
their text but will persist in dragging in terms of subjective
import — is not so clear. Why should they not use the
subjective words ? How do they go beyond the reckoning,
when it is exactly the same thing they are speaking about in
the one language or in the other? Or is Mr. Lewes's
meaning this — that the physiologist indeed must keep, like
222 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
any other physical inquirer, to the sphere of the objective in
which he finds himself and which he cannot explain, but the
psychologist is at liberty to pass at will between the sub-
jective and the objective spheres because he knows and can
prove them to be one in reality? If this be so, surely the
psychologist's fate is hard. Alas for his insight if it must
be the death of his science — if it shows him the same thing
with two different sides to be named and will not suffer him
to speak consistently about either !
Now let us note, before closing the account, two other
positions taken by Mr. Lewes that are in different ways
remarkable. One is where he declares at the end of his
whole argument (p. 409), that "the question of Automatism
may be summarily disposed of by a reference to the irre-
sistible evidence each man carries in his own consciousness
that his actions are frequently — even if not always — deter-
mined by feelings. He is quite certain that he is not an
automaton and that his feelings are not simply collateral
products of his actions, without the power of modifying or
originating them." And Mr. Lewes adds, " this fundamental
fact cannot be displaced by any theoretical explanation of
its factors ". One reads the words with a certain surprise.
There may be reason indeed for protesting against such an
incautious statement as that feelings are "products" of
(nervous) actions : all that Mr. Lewes urges anywhere
against attempting to explain the psychical series as de-
pendent on the physical series, is much to the point. An
Automatist who contends for pure parallelism of the physical
and the mental, must no more think of breaking the mental
line for the physical than the physical for the mental, nor
has he a right to view the mental as a discontinuous efflux
from the unbroken chain of nervous events. But the bare
suggestion that any scientific deliverance on the subject can
be based upon the immediate evidence of consciousness, is
somewhat confounding when it comes from Mr. Lewes.
The end of that kind of reference in questions of philosophy
is but too well known. If it were allowed in this particular
case, what becomes of the parallelism of aspects which
nobody maintains more strongly or on deeper grounds than
Mr. Lewes? He would break it in one direction as much
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 223
as he charges Prof. Huxley with breaking it in the other.
But, indeed, from the point of view of direct consciousness,
what question is there of a parallelism at all? That a
nervous process represents one purely phenomenal aspect of
what, on another purely phenomenal aspect, is a conscious
mental state, may be a very profound truth, but it never
was ascertained on direct evidence of consciousness, which,
in the sense in which it ever may be said to take account
of nervous processes, views them as physical changes in a
material structure supposed to exist apart. Nor, whatever
reason or excuse there may be for the natural conviction we
have as to a relation between feeling and bodily action, can
this be allowed to affect one way or another the validity of
the philosophical interpretation.
The other statement referred to occurs at an earlier part
of the argument, but is here taken last because it gives
occasion for the few remarks on the doctrine of so-called
Automatism which will bring this article to a close. Can
we tianslate all psychological phenomena into mechanical
terms ? asks Mr. Lewes at p. 352, and he replies (for reasons
before mentioned) that we cannot — "nay, that we cannot
even translate them all into physiological terms . . . nor
can the laws of Mind be deduced from physiological pro-
cesses, unless supplemented by and interpreted by psychical
conditions individual and social". It is important to take
account of this last remark (though it is not followed out at
the place or anywhere adequately enforced throughout the
discussion), because otherwise the denial of the possibility of
expressing mental phenomena in phvsiological terms would
stand in sharp contradiction with all that the author so
often says about neural and mental processes. Plainly he can-
not mean that there is not an exact physiological expression (if
it could be obtained) for every psychological phenomenon.
He rather means (I can only suppose) that just in the sense
in which a biological phenomenon is more than a chemical
one, so a psychological phenomenon is more than a biological.
And this is a most important consideration, which if fully
grasped may lead us to see that the notion of Automatism
fails to express just that which is most characteristic in the
life of Mind. But for this a little explanation is necessary.
'224 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF M-IND.
It was said above that there is a sense in which the
expression of biological phenomena in purely objective terms
of motion may be called a mechanical view of them. Does
this mean that from the principles of mechanics it is possible
to deduce the phenomena of life? Not at all. It only
means that, as life is manifested by a material structure,
no vital change, when it happens, can be interpreted other-
wise than as some more or less complex phenomenon of
motion. More immediately, in many cases, the vital change
may have to be phrased as a chemical process, but this, it is
not denied, is a peculiar mode of motion — some re-arrange-
ment, let us say, of atoms in space ; and mechanics (or
general physics) contains the laws of all such change of
position. Of course there is nothing absolute or final in such
an expression of chemical and biological phenomena. Even
supposing we could assign to the minutest particular all the
motions or re-arrangements in space that constitute a
chemical or a biological phenomenon — supposing, that is to
say, we had found the complete physical or mechanical ex-
pression— it would still remain a problem to find the purely
mathematical expression of this physical expression ; and,
again, the full mathematical expression, if it could be found,
might be viewed as the result of a conceivable logical
combination. But short of this last stage, at which the
problem ceases to belong to objective science, it has come
to be thought sufficient in modern times to find the
mechanical expression for any material phenomenon, because
motion admits of definite measurement ; and hence the idea
that such an expression constitutes an ideal explanation.
However, just as the laws of motion cannot themselves
be deduced from mathematical principles without data from
experience, so, I repeat, there is no question of merging
chemistry or biology in physics, in seeking for a mechanical
interpretation of chemical and vital phenomena. Chemical
processes must be investigated in the special conditions
under which they appear in our experience — only always in
the light of physical principles ; vital processes likewise —
only always in the light of physical and chemical principles.
And so also mental phenomena, while studied in the light of
biological principles and the others implied in these, have
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 225
to be investigated in the special conditions that are found
to determine them. They doubtless admit of translation
into physiological terms, but physiology can never explain
their rise.
Now the doctrine -of Automatism declares that the state
of the living organism, more particularly the nervous system,
is at any moment the effect of its state immediately preceding
and the cause of its state immediately succeeding; just as
an automaton, or mechanism involving some internal
principle of motion, goes through a series of operations each
of which in turn brings on the next. As a matter of fact,
the various nervous processes, as they are successively brought
to pass, have or may have subjective concomitants, which
are called, in the cases where they excite attention, states of
conscious experience ; but none of these have the least real
influence in determining the next condition of the organism,
or (as it should be, but is not always, clearly understood and
expressed) are themselves determined by the accompanying
or the foregoing organic states — at least in the sense in
which these are causally related to one another. Though
the presence of consciousness makes the man or animal a
conscious automaton, all the vital acts that are commonly
called mental are, it is said, truly those of an automaton
inasmuch as they are physically predetermined and would
come to pass equally though consciousness were wholly
absent. The doctrine is thus something more than a mere
extension of the Reflex Theory, as it was previously described.
As the name Automatism suggests, the organism is supposed
to have within itself a principle of action whereby the
succession of nervous processes, both cerebral and spinal, is
physically determined ; and the direct implication is that
the life of man or animal not only may be considered as a
set of purely physical occurrences, but cannot otherwise be
scientifically regarded.
Now, if this is at all a true representation of the theory
of Animal Automatism, it is surely quite inadequate as an
expression of the facts of mental life. The state of the brain
or whole nervous system at any moment is always one
factor in the causation of its succeeding state, but, at least
in all cases where anything of the nature of a new mental
15
226 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
experience or acquisition is involved, it is one factor only.
If we consider how many and what kind of factors may co-
operate in producing the physiological condition (of brain,
&c.) which corresponds with that which we call (subjectively)
a mental judgment — even a very simple one — we are
obviously face to face with a phenomenon belonging to an
altogether peculiar order of occurrence. Using the word in
the first instance merely for discrimination, we have in the
mental phenomenon something at the least as much more
complex than a vital phenomenon as this is more complex
than a chemical phenomenon. And whether or not there
is any scientific advantage (perhaps there is not much) in
likening the multiplicity of vital reactions to the reaction of
.an automaton, because both are motions determined largely
from within, — in the case of mental phenomena, at all
events, the comparison is unsatisfactory in every way.
While the reference to any internal mechanical arrangement
that may be devised gives, on the one hand, hardly the least
notion of the marvellous organisation of the nervous system,
slowly developed as this has been in and through actual
working, it gives, on the other hand, an exaggerated notion
-of its independent activity as the organ of what is specially
called Mind. For all its apparent spontaneity, the" nervous
system as the organ of mind works mainly in response to
stimuli supplied by the natural and social environments.
Even if nothing had to be said about a subjective repre-
sentation of these, to overlook them as factors in the peculiar
result which follows from them is to omit all that is most
characteristic in the case.
But it may be said that it is no part of the doctrine to
exclude reference to the external factors : what is really con-
tended for is the right to express all the factors, internal or
external, in physical terms, or rather the scientific necessity
of so doing, and the right to discount all reference to
conscious or subjective experience as irrelevant to the
scientific issue, whatever other interest it may happen to
possess. And truly, though the word Automatism is quite
inappropriate as an expression for this conception, it is not
for a moment to be denied that the mental life from first to
last in all its phases — its potencies, its actuality, its very
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 227
aspirations and ideals — admits conceivably of physical ex-
pression. But the grave mistake, nay the profound error, is
to think of building the science of mind upon such a founda-
tion— is to fancy that this way of looking at mind is the only
scientific way, or even, in the actual circumstances, at all
truly scientific. Would it be right to defer the study
of life till physics and chemistry with mathematics are
sufficiently developed to furnish a deduction of it, or, if not
wholly deferring the study, are inquirers bound to refrain
from establishing any facts or laws which they cannot exactly
express in terms of chemistry and physics ? Physiologists,
by their practice, answer emphatically No, and theoretically
they might urge that the chance of ever finding the physico-
chemical expression of vital phenomena (to say nothing of
their fully reasoned construction) depends not least on the
prior ascertainment of the phenomena as vital. With what
reason, then, can the impression, or even (as it may be and
is) the well-grounded conviction, that mind in all its phases
has its physical equivalent, whereby it is brought within the
realm of objective nature and may on this side conceivably
be studied — with what reason can this conviction be urged
against the study of subjective mind, or be made the ground
of a serious assertion that consciousness is a mere accident
of a certain determinate succession of physical events, when,
but as they are subjectively represented, the factors whereon
the events depend could not be discerned and brought
within the view of scientific inquiry ? A possible assertion
it, no doubt, is, and there may even be some use in making
it by the way, as a means of lending impressiveness to the
affirmation of the never-failing physical aspect of the mental
life. But it is no serious assertion to rest in with a view to
science, for the reason just given. The conditions natural
and social upon which mind and the corresponding series
of organic states in point of fact depend, would never come
into view at all except in the guise of properly conscious or
psychological experience. Only as we are first conscious
of influences received from the world of nature and (through
speech and otherwise) from our fellow-men, can we after-
wards have any true idea of all the (physical) circumstances
entering into the causation of that series of nervous positions
228 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND.
which we may come to think of as co-existing with the flow
of our subjective life. How then can this be truly described
as accidental in the case ? And let it be observed that here
the argument is conducted strictly from the point of view of
phenomenal science. We may leave out of sight that deeper
philosophical consideration, according to which the series of
complex physiological events itself appears in ultimate
analysis as compacted of a special class of conscious
experiences.
In my opinion, the Keflex Theory and the more developed
Automatic Theory err not in what they really affirm but in
what they are understood by many of their advocates to
deny. When the Reflex Theory is supposed to mean that
the nervous action of the spinal cord is in no way related to
the life of subjective experience, it goes beyond the evidence,
even although there can be no proof positive of the counter-
assertion that every central nervous process is at the same
time, in another point of view, a fact of mental experience
conforming to psychological law. When the Automatic
Theory is given out as meaning that conscious experience
has no scientific import, it not only goes beyond the evidence
but bars the way against the kind of psychological investiga-
tion that practically and theoretically can best be justified.
The Reflex Theory brings into view a consideration of great
scientific moment when it declares that, without the least
reference to conscious or any kind of subjective experience,
there is physical provision in the nervous system for the
accomplishment of acts most deeply affecting the well-being
of the organism. It only errs if it is understood to imply
that there is no further question to be asked about such
arrangements and that they cannot be at all viewed, either
in their origin or in their developed form, as related to the
mental life. So also the Automatic Theory advances science
when it suggests as a constant problem the expression of all
mental phenomena in those objective terms which can be
made so much more definite than subjective expression ever
is. But it impedes science when it discourages the specific
study of mind in all the variety of its actual conditions and
manifestations — for the sake of a premature and barren
physiological deduction. Will any brooding over physio-
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MIND. 229
logical data lead to anything but the most vague and general
results in the way of psychological inference? Nobody who
reflects will pretend that it can ; and one must go further
and deny that even the vaguest psychological conclusion
can be so obtained, unless with the physiological data there be*
coupled unawares some data of purely psychological, which is
to say subjective, experience. I would not quarrel with the
theory of Automatism on the ground most commonly taken.
Though it gives a very inadequate expression to the infinite
variety of circumstances determining human actions as viewed
objectively, people must learn to be content with the plain
truth that man, however he may be " man" (which is saying
much), is not "master of his fate," but has his part and lot in
the destiny of that — whatever it may be — which is called the
physical world. But this truth is little towards all that we
want to know of our strange double-sided human existence, and
we cannot know more if our scientific activity is to be limited to
such abstract theorising as finds expression in the doctrine of
Automatism. Mental life can never be understood either in its
essence or in its fulness, unless it is studied directly alike as it
discloses itself to subjective introspection and as it is manifested
more broadly in social relations and in the record of history.
The conclusion of the whole matter is that Psychology,
however it may be related to biology, must be upheld as
a perfectly distinct science — in no sense less distinct than
chemistry is from physics, and in truth much more distinct
because of the transition from the objective to the subjective
point of view. And, returning to Mr. Lewes who has shown
himself among the first — who claims indeed in his present
preface to have been quite the first — to understand Psycho-
logy as the science of Mind in its wider implications, I can-
not but venture the opinion that he has not now made all
the use that might have been expected of his insight in
dealing with the fallacy of " Animal Automatism ".
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.1
A TIMELY question is raised in the foregoing paper,2 and
answered with great directness and vigour. The question is
opportunely raised at a time when the Civil Service Commis-
sioners, whose sway gains with every year upon the higher
instruction of the country — as new classes of appointments
are thrown open to competition — have decreed that Moral
Science shall cease to figure by the side of Logic in the
scheme of the long-established Indian examination, giving
place to Political Economy. This change was invoked with
more than prophetic exactness by Mr. A. J. Balfour in the
Fortnightly Review of August last (1877), before the issue of
the revised scheme, and its significance is not the less that
a year earlier another public body, the University of London,
as noted at the time in these pages (No. 4, p. 577),3 was
moved in whatever spirit to throw away one of the chief
distinctions of its examination-system when it ceased to
require of all candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Science
some knowledge of Logic and Psychology. Now comes
Mr. Stewart's argument, conceived from a quite independent
point of view, yet so running in part — where he puts forward
Logic but makes conditions about Philosophy — that it might
be read almost as a justification of the precise action of the
Civil Service Commissioners (or Indian Secretary). Such
an apparent consensus of opinion is too remarkable not to
require some consideration of its grounds. There may also
be some use in confronting with the recommendations of an
Oxford lecturer those which a different kind of practical
experience would suggest to another teacher. And in a
journal that was founded mainly on the faith of the ex-
istence of a properly scientific doctrine of mind, it seems
right not to pass over some observations that Mr. Stewart
makes by the way on the character of Psychology.
, iii. 241. 2By Mr. J. A. Stewart on same subject. 3 See above, p. 182.
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 231
First, a few words on the opinion expressed by Mr. Balfour
in the course of a general argument on the Indian examina-
tion. In his judgment, Moral Science — meaning Metaphysics
and Ethics — fails to satisfy every one of the conditions of a
good examination-subject, while Political Economy satisfies
them all. The effort of memory, he says, in mastering the
subject, should be small compared with the effort of intelli-
gence ; it should be easy to distinguish an answer that shows
a merely skilful use of the memory from one that shows an
intelligent grasp of the subject ; and there should be sub-
stantial agreement respecting the body of doctrine in which
the examination is held. Waiving the point whether in
this last respect Political Economy does at the present day
stand in a better position than Moral Science, I should
doubt whether his third condition is of as much practical
importance for the ends of a selective examination as he
deems it, while as to the other conditions it surely might be
contended that they are very exceptionally satisfied by
Moral Science. There can be no question of "mastering"
this subject by effort of memory, nor will an examiner, if he
knows his business, have much difficulty in judging whether
a student is merely remembering or understands a philo-
sophical doctrine. The question, however, that I should
like to put to Mr. Balfour is whether it is his opinion that
Moral Science should not be studied at all by the class of
men whence Indian Civil Servants are drawn. If this is not
his meaning, the true way of dealing with the examination
should rather be to make it more stringent. What I
suppose Mr. Balfour really to mean is that a smattering of
philosophical knowledge is not, like some other smatterings,
a harmless mental possession ; and this may be freely allowed.
It is an evil if hitherto men have been tempted to " get up "
a little Moral Science, under the impression that it was an
easy way of securing marks. Whether the marks were
secured or not, the men are likely enough to have suffered
mentally and morally by the venture. But the remedy is
to take care, by the nature of the examination if not other-
wise, that candidates shall have gone through some real and
deliberate study. If it be said that this cannot be provided
for, but rather the subject must be dropt out of the examina-
232 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
tion-scheme as not a "good" one (in the sense of Mr.
Balfour's conditions or any other), the effect will be to
confirm those people in their opinion who think that the
public competitive system attains its end at a ruinous sacri-
fice. The mechanical exigencies of the system, thus applied,
might easily prove the death of higher academic culture in
the country. It may not be desirable that as many youths
should take up with Philosophy as with Mathematics- or
even Political Economy, but those who follow the philosophic
call that comes early to some should not therefore be excluded
from the public services.1
Coming now to Mr. Stewart, I find much to agree with in
his positions. It is a very senseless or even mischievous
proceeding to begin the study of Philosophy with a general
view of historical systems ; nor could the reasons against such
a course be more forcibly or accurately expressed than by
him. It may also be, and doubtless it often happens, that a
beginning is made with Psychology in circumstances such
that the step is as inappropriate as he describes it. Neither
is any fault to be found with his recommendation to begin
with a course of Pure Logic : some teachers do this regularly
with great advantage to their students, and even boys and
girls at school, as Mr. Stewart rightly urges, may thus be
led on, almost insensibly, from their grammatical lessons to
a first understanding of the philosophical point of view. As
little would one think of contesting his view of the general
mental discipline that comes of really intimate converse with
any of the master-spirits whose thought is of the cast that
withstands all change of time.
1 It is only an act of bare justice to acknowledge that the Civil Service
Commissioners show the most anxious desire to secure an effective system
of examination, and to this intent are never slow to modify their practical
regulations in the light of new experience. Nor can it be doubted that
the present change in the scheme of examination-subjects — a far more
serious matter than a change of working-rules — is meant in the interest
of thoroughness. But has it been duly considered in the light of its effect
upon the higher instruction of the country? The lowering of the maxi-
mum age of candidates for Indian Civil Service appointments, from twenty-
one to nineteen, makes an important difference in the case of this particular
examination ; still the change, as affecting one of the recognised branches
of academic instruction singly, is ominous all the same, and it will press
hardly upon students in those parts of the country where Philosophy is
studied most and earliest.
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 233
Is Philosophy, however, only such an T}#O<? as Mr. Stewart
would make it? The analogy with Poetry has its founda-
tion. In the depths of your being you feel thus or thus, and
if you have the gift of utterance you burst forth in measured
strain, or lacking spontaneity you revel in this or that poetic
creation of others. So of one's philosophy it may be said
that it is simply how one tends to think of all things — the
general and ultimate expression of -one's intellectual person-
ality. You cannot prove a philosophical as you prove a
scientific theory : you take it or leave it. Still a philosophical,
like a scientific, theory assumes to be a subjective expression
of objective fact. One studies the system of a philosopher
not expecting to have one's assent extorted as by scientific
demonstration, but yet with the aim of being brought to a
state of intellectual acquiescence. It is therefore no matter
of indifference what systems of philosophy we shall study.
The classical student will very naturally turn to the Republic
or the Ethics, and if he really enters into the mind of Plato
or Aristotle, will end by being more than a scholar ; but if
his first object is to obtain philosophical insight — help and
inspiration in comprehending himself and the world that he
knows by common or (as even a classical student may to
some extent know it) by scientific experience — he is more
likely to find what he seeks in thinkers nearer to his own
time and circumstances.- So it is very well that the " young
Englishman" should learn to admire the sterling qualities of
Locke's nature, intellectual and moral, as they shine forth
from the pages of the Essay ; but he may be helped to see
farther into things and have more guidance in ordering his
life if he will study those masters who think- on a basis of
better-ascertained experience, physical and psychological,
than Locke did. It is the true Oxford note that is heard
hi Mr. Stewart's injunction — "Read a Classic". Classics,
whether ancient or modern, are worthy of all regard, and it
may be hoped that .by this time we are all alive to the duty
of assimilating into our consciousness whatever is best in the
record of human thought. But the philosophical craving,
once it is really awakened in any mind, is not to be satisfied
by the aesthetic contemplation of a past thinker's work, be
he called Locke or Aristotle. Philosophy is not therefore
234 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
Literature, because there are theoretic as well as practical
grounds for distinguishing it from Science.
Even when he appears to be pleading the cause of true
as against sham science, the ways of study at Oxford are still
uppermost in Mr. Stewart's mind. It is in the interest of
Science, not of Literature, that he deprecates the practice of
beginning a philosophical course with the study of Psychology,
and is led on to urge his objections against the claim of
psychological doctrine to rank as scientific. These will be
considered presently in their material import. Viewed in
their educational bearing, their force seems wholly to depend
on one assumption — that the average Oxford student with
his public school training in classics or mathematics re-
presents the case of all youths who are brought into contact
with philosophical questions through the portals of Psycho-
logy. Put the case that a student, besides being fairly read
in ancient or modern literature, is acquainted not only with
the principles of mathematical reasoning but also to some
extent with the experimental methods of physics and chem-
istry and even with the procedure of biology — how will he
suffer in intellectual character by being set to see the
processes of science brought to bear on the facts of sub-
jective consciousness? If he knows nothing of the ways of
science except what he can learn from Euclid, he may
indeed be exposed to the dangers which Mr. Stewart forcibly
depicts, but the fault lies with his previous training rather
than with Psychology, which might perhaps, by the very
nature of things, be no more strict a discipline than Mr.
Stewart would make it without therefore either losing the
character of Science or ceasing to be the best introduction
to the study of Philosophy. It might be supposed too,
frcrn the vehemence of Mr. Stewart's argument, that in this
country great numbers of students are every year being set
to learn from psychological primers, and that all of them,
by reason of an exclusively literary or merely mathematical
training, are exactly in the condition to have their minds
hopelessly perverted in the process. So far as I know, there
exists no psychological primer in the language ; the number
of students, in England at least, that take in any way to
Philosophy, is relatively very small ; the number of Philoso-
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 235
phical students anywhere in Britain that are introduced to
Philosophy through Psychology is not great ; and those of
them who in such a case use books like Mr. Spencer's
Psychology and Prof. Bain's larger or smaller treatises are
not in general so ignorant of physical science as to be in
serious danger of misunderstanding everything in the direc-
tion of Mr. Stewart's fears. At least, if they study with a
teacher who himself understands, they may easily enough
be kept from taking everything in an "abstract" sense — so
far, that is to say, as they ought to be : physical science
when it experiments, biology when it experiments or com-
pares, neither of them can help " abstracting ".
The indictment brought by Mr. Stewart against the
scientific standing of Psychology comes altogether to some-
thing like this : Psychology is not a science, because it is
neither abstract like Mathematics or Political Economy, nor
experimental like Physics or Chemistry, nor comparative
like Biology ; because, that is to say, it deals neither with
such a mere aspect of things as number or figure or such a
separable phenomenon in social life as wealth, nor with
manageable and measurable physical events, nor with
organic forms which if they grow and change have an
inexhaustible variety of perceptible attributes preserving
fixed relations with one another at every stage. And it is
all quite true : Mind is no such quality of objective things
as even life, to say nothing of physical motion or figure and
number. Mind is the name for just that which is most
opposed to what we call objective qualities (though these
themselves in ultimate philosophical analysis are easily
shown to have an expression in terms of mental experience).
But what follows? That there can be no such thing as
true statements regarding mind as it appears in you and in
me and all our kind ? That your subjective experience and
mine have not common limits and are not developed
according to definite laws the same for us both — laws and
limits alike ascertainable ? That, in short, there is nothing
that can be called psychological science ; but if we would
take heed of our inmost nature it must be in the way of
personal fancy guided by the example of some classical
philosopher, ancient or modern ? So Mr. Stewart seems to
236 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
think. But not so think all the best philosophic heads of
English name for some two centuries back. Not so think
in ever-increasing force the most active spirits of other
countries where the philosophy of subjective fancy has taken
its boldest flights. These have laboured and labour with
the difficulties of subjective observation which they know to
be most real, and with the graver difficulty of verifying or
proving universally valid the relations which the intro-
spective observer finds or thinks he finds among the facts
of his own conscious experience. They have gradually, as
the objective sciences, especially physiology, have been
slowly developed, acquired the habit of giving greater fixity
to their subjective expressions by connecting them, wherever
possible, with phenomena of the bodily life — a practice as
perfectly legitimate from the scientific point of view as
anything could be. They have also, in the most recent
time, come to see that mind may be studied not only in its
direct bodily manifestations but also in its products — in
manners and customs, social or religious, and in all the
variety of objective phenomena that are the special care of
the anthropologist and comparative psychologist ; which is
again a practice the legitimacy of which cannot reasonably
be questioned if it results in the least grain of insight.
When all is reckoned, the insight acquired is doubtless
defective enough, and the most hopeful psychologists who
are wise have the fullest sense of what remains to be done
before the scientific title of their doctrine will gain general
recognition. At present, imperfect as the doctrine is in
many ways, its scientific title is denied less on that account
and less on account of the real difficulties that must ever
beset its procedure, than simply because its subject-matter
(as its champions even more than its foes will contend) is
disparate from that of any other of the sciences commonly
allowed. Unfortunately, also, with this disparateness of
psychological facts and with ,the acknowledged difficulty of
verifying general assertions about Mind, there exists for
every man the most perfect facility of expression respecting
his own inner experience, which may be straightway taken
as representative of all. Hence a popular opinion, laid hold
of and systematically applied by some metaphysical thinkers,
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 237
that a special or technical science of Mind is a superfluity.
Mr. Stewart is not of that opinion, for he desiderates the
science he denies ; but the way he would have Philosophy
studied seems curiously well calculated for hindering the
growth of an effective Psychology.1
For my part, be the imperfections of present Psychology
what they may, I cannot hesitate to maintain that with
Psychology and nothing else the beginning of express philo-
sophical study should be made. Whether or not it may be
expected that men will agree in philosophical as in scientific
matters, I differ from Mr. Stewart in assuming that it is
desirable they should ; because Philosophy aims at the
expression of a certain kind of truth, and, though there may
be different kinds of truth, there is but one truth of the
same kind. Besides, it has always lain in the notion of
Philosophy that the insight obtained should be subservient
to conduct, and this makes philosophising a serious business
in life, not a mere piece of self-indulgence. Assuming, then,
that men are to be brought, as far as may be, to agreement
in philosophical conclusions, I desire that the beginning of
philosophical study should be made upon ground where
1 The really serious charge, not overlooked by Mr. Stewart, that may
be urged against Psychology as it now stands, touches the vagueness and
generality of its statements. Even in the most scientific of modern
psychological treatises there appears little disposition (as the Scotch say)
" to condescend upon particulars," and it does not very plainly appear
in the books what advantage is gained by restricting the search to phe-
nomenal explanation after the approved manner of the positive sciences,
instead of having recourse to metaphysical entities like the " faculties "
of the older theorists. No doubt, the business of a scientific manual or
theoretic treatise is not to deal with special cases, but to embody general
results and to enunciate abstract laws. The true sign, however, that
laws proper have been established in any subject, is when they lend
themselves to the explanation of particular phenomena, and inevitably
suggest deductive applications to be verified by actual experience.
The true sign that a science has reached (in its measure) the positive
stage, is when its cultivators are moved to essay all kinds of special in-
vestigations, and recognise clearly the practical bearing of its principles.
In proportion as this journal is made the vehicle of publication for re-
searches into the special phases of mental life, will it prove the scientific
character of Psychology, and so fulfil the prime object of its institution.
Or, again, in proportion as English psychologists trust themselves to
give direction to the educators of youth, will it appear whether those
" Laws of Association " which they have put forward as determining all
natural development of consciousness and more particularly all intel-
lectual synthesis, are truly the ultimate scientific principles they
suppose.
238 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
agreement is most easily attainable, and this is afforded by
Psychology. But here a particular conception of Psychology
is, no doubt, implied, and this should be well understood.
It is implied that Psychology, while it has an altogether
peculiar matter in dealing with the subjective life of con-
sciousness, is brought into relation through Biology with
the positive sciences that deal with objective fact, and is, in
its own measure, amenable to the recognised conditions of
scientific procedure. Now this renders necessary, as a
preliminary to psychological study, some course of scientific
training. Certainly, as Mr. Stewart urges, the student
should not be left to learn from the statement of psycholo-
gists what Science is (or is not). But I would add, neither
should the student be allowed to take up Philosophy or
Psychology without something more than what Mr. Stewart
seems to think may serve instead of scientific training —
some " ordinary experience of the kind of evidence required
by practical men of culture for alleged facts and events ".
That means, I suppose, either that the study should be
deferred till men have been about in the world, or that an
acquaintance with good literature will afford the necessary
experience. The one supposition amounts to an exclusion
of philosophical study from the academic course altogether ;
the other is based on what seems to me the mistaken
conception of Philosophy that pervades Mr. Stewart's paper.
The truest friend of philosophical study, at the present day,
will, I' think, be the most anxious to contend for a prelimi-
nary basis of properly scientific culture. If Philosophy may
be understood as rational interpretation of the universe in
relation to man, it is of the utmost importance that philoso-
phic thinking should work upon that knowledge which is
surest — and this is Science. To say this is not to exclude
Literature and History from the philosopher's preparation.
The true nature of man is not to be learnt apart from the
record of human actions in History and the expression of
human sentiments and opinions in Literature. But the key
to the philosophic interpretation even of Literature and
History (their enjoyment is another matter) is to be found in
the scientific habit of mind, and this can be gained only by
a study of the special or positive sciences. While, therefore,
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 239
I contend for beginning a philosophical course with Psycho-
logy in the interest of definiteness and with a view to
unanimity, I assume that Psychology — so special or complex
if it is viewed (in its place after Biology) as an objective
science, so unique and hard to grasp if it is viewed as the
science of subjective experience — will not itself be the first
scientific doctrine to which the student is introduced. If it
be, the very advantage sought for in making it the first stage
of a philosophical discipline is rendered impossible. If, on
the other hand, it is itself regarded as the natural term of a
general scientific training, the dire effects fancied by Mr.
Stewart are in no way to be feared, even though it were
true that psychological results could be made no more
definite than he finds them.
The case for Psychology is in truth extremely plain and
simple. In Philosophy we are going to consider what may
be said more or less determinately concerning the whole
frame of things and marf's relation thereto; and we can
proceed in either of two ways. We may begin in haphazard
fashion, looking at the universe of being from this particular
side or that, according to the fancy and temperament of the
thinker. Or we may be guided by the thought that well-
ascertained knowledge, to which we give the name of
Science, has become possible under certain conditions of
purely phenomenal consideration, and, as it is clear that
our mental life in its various phases must contain an ex-
pression for all that is known, felt, or aimed at in relation to
the world of being, we may seek to come at our ultimate
comprehension of this through the most strictly scientific
consideration that may be attainable of the facts and laws of
mind as it appears. This psychological science is not in
itself Philosophy, but there is no philosophical question
whatever that has not its roots in some fact or facts of
mental experience, and, however difficult it may be, men
can, if they try, come to something like agreement here, and
may then be impelled towards the same philosophical
conclusions beyond. This is the great and fruitful idea that
has inspired all characteristically British thinking for more
than two centuries past, and it has been a truly philosophical
conception even in those cases where the thinker has sought
240 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
to merge everything in mere Psychology, and failed to mark
where he crossed the border-line. It has preserved English
philosophers from many a pitfall that has received less wary
thinkers, and, as it arose in Locke and others from their
having regard to the first great achievements of modern
science, so in these latter days, when the natural sciences
have had, as it were, a new birth, it has gained widely upon
men's minds, and become the dominant conception in Philo-
sophy.
If Psychology (with due preparation) is taken first in a
philosophical course, Logic will naturally follow next.
Should the formal doctrine, as Mr. Stewart suggests, have
entered into the school-work, so much will have been gained,
but, if not communicated earlier, it can no longer be deferred.
The importance of Logic as a preliminary to philosophical
thinking is accurately described by Mr. Stewart ; or it may
be regarded as a constituent part of Philosophy. There is
not a more intelligible, or, when fairly understood, a more
satisfactory definition of Logic than to view it as the doctrine
regulative of thinking (or general knowledge) with a view to
truth. From this point of view, its relation to Psychology
and also its distinctive character are at once clearly seen.
For the regulation of thinking it is necessary to understand
how thinking naturally proceeds ; at the same time, psycho-
logical insight does not of itself supply regulation. Regu-
lation is a practical requirement, not a simply theoretic
or scientific conception, and as applied to a phase of mental
life corresponds with the strict notion of Philosophy. Logic,
in relation to Psychology, may therefore be regarded as a
department of Philosophy, and this entirely without pre-
judice to another view according to which it may be taken
as the most general of the abstract sciences, more general
(in the sense that it deals with wider and simpler objective
relations) than Mathematics, as Mathematics is more general
than Physics. The conditions of Truth or true knowledge
— Science as opposed to Opinion — being the concern of Logic
viewed as a philosophical discipline, the discipline must be
not less wide than are the varieties of truth. There is truth,
as we say, to one's self and truth of fact, or (otherwise
expressed) truth of consistency and real or objective truth.
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 241
Formal Logic determines the condition of self-consistency,
and is very properly taken first, because the prime concern
with all of us, born as we are into the social state, is to
work out more or less fully the meaning of the general
assertions communicated to us that make far the greatest
part of all we call our knowledge, and to apply general rules
of practical conduct which it was never left to each of us to
devise. But it is quite necessary to follow up Formal Logic
with that other doctrine of Applied or Material Logic (or
however else it is called) to which Mr. Stewart so pointedly
refers. The study of such books as Mill's Logic, or Prof.
Jevons's Principles of Science, in their methodological parts,
may have little meaning for minds that know nothing of the
special sciences ; but students who have even a small ac-
quaintance with scientific facts are very profitably led to
consider the principles of evidence upon which they are
received with a confidence varying in different kinds of
matter, since the very same principles are involved in all the
real inferences drawn in common life. At the same time it
may be readily granted that to catch the true scientific spirit
it is necessary to follow a master like Mr. Darwin at his
work, be it coral-reefs or carnivorous plants that he is for
the time investigating with an almost unconscious perfection
of method ; though the real appreciation of what in him has
become art is greatly helped by foregone express study of
Methodology. The class of inquiries coming under the head
of Theory of Knowledge, it should also be added, falls to
be introduced at this stage. The most scientific part of
Philosophy proper is naturally associated with the logical
determination of the conditions of Science.
On the same level with Logic and in a similar relation to
Psychology stands Ethics. The student is not fit to enter
upon this department of philosophical discipline without
such preliminary training as has here been sketched, but
with such training I do not see in what respect — as, for
example, want of as much knowledge of the world as he may
afterwards acquire — he is now unfit to be introduced to it.
Now or at any time, however, he ought, in my opinion, to be
introduced to ethical questions, not upon any interest he may
happen to feel or be induced to feel in a particular work,
16
4242 PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION.
whether of Aristotle or another, but definitely in relation to
the original start in Psychology. Human action needs to be
regulated as well as simply accounted for, and the philosophical
theory of its regulation is Ethics, but for this it first needs to
be explained in its natural manifestations. In a complete
philosophical course, the student would also have presented
to him the theory of the regulation of Feeling as far as this
has yet been worked out, on a psychological basis, in Esthe-
tics.
What remains, as it seems to me, is that at this stage
and not before — at all events not before Psychology has been
followed up by Logic in its broaler interpretation — the study
of History of Philosophy should be seriously taken in hand.
And I do not hesitate to say, with all the fear of Mr. Stewart
upon me, that the study should in the first instance be made
quite comprehensive and general, and that only afterwards
should come that special occupation with this thinker or the
other which with Mr. Stewart is the beginning and end of
philosophical discipline. I would add too — what has been
already remarked in another connexion — that when it comes
to this it is no matter of indifference who the thinker is that
should thus be assimilated into the student's mind. As we
have to think now-a-days in reference to a quite different ex-
perience from that of two or three, not to say twenty or more,
centuries ago, it behoves the student to begin his special study
of philosophers with a master not too far removed. The Eng-
lish student, supposing him to have become moderately
familiar with the recent work of his own countrymen at the
earlier or more positive stages of his philosophical course, can-
not procure himself at once so much elevation of view and so
much serious discipline in regard to the intellectual needs of
the present time as by a thorough study of Kant at first hand.
What knowledge of previous speculation is necessary for the
understanding of Kant will have been obtained in the course
of that general view of the development of philosophical
thinking which is here supposed to have gone before.
The reason for studying Philosophy proper in its History
is not far to seek. Even Science cannot be intelligently laid
hold of without some notion of the way along which the
present state of knowledge has been reached. Much more
PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION. 243
will it be an aid to philosophical insight to mark the past
phases of speculation. Though there is no greater error than
to suppose that there has been no movement in philosophical
thinking or that there has been movement but no progress,
it is not to be thought that a serious philosophical doctrine
that fully satisfied the human mind at any stage of its de-
velopment, can be discounted like the first rude representation
of fact in early Science, or that it retains a purely antiquarian
interest only. As Philosophy, though also a representation
of a certain kind of fact, is essentially a representation that
keeps terms with human feeling and human aspiration — is,
in point of fact, subjectively determined— we are to expect in
this department of human conceiving a certain recurrence of
typical modes of interpretation that can never lose their value
for different classes of minds, and thus an amount of guidance
from the historical past which is not to be expected elsewhere.
Nor, for my part, do I see how Philosophy proper (or Meta-
physic in its stricter sense) can profitably be conveyed to
students except in the criticu-historical fashion. Even if a
teacher, in these critical rather than constructive days, seeks
to expound his ultimate view of things to a class of students,
it is to them but one other added to the tale of historical
systems, and the chances, in any particular case, are against
the supposition of its being of equal value with the greater
philosophical constructions that have weathered the storms
of time. As the crown of a philosophical education, students
are to be taught to think for themselves ; and to this end
there seems no other way but that of bringing before them a
representation of the thinking of the best minds of the race.
On this vital point there is no difference between Mr. Stewart
and me. I object only to the arbitrary way in which he seems
to shut up the student to converse with this single thinker
or that, whereas I would give the student, after due prepara-
tion, the free choice of all. And as a last word I repeat after
due preparation — scientific and other.
THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES.1
MR. SETH in his Development from Kant to Hegel (reviewed in
Mind, No. 27), after remarking against Kant's theory of
' intelligible freedom ' that " in separating the man from his
' character ' — intelligible or phenomenal — an unwarrantable
abstraction is involved," goes on (p. 105 n.) to say : —
" Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom
which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination
by motives. The error of the Determinists from which this
idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the man
from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the
two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists
between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in
the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and
that, consequently, he is in every instance self-determined."
A somewhat similar view as regards (at least the language
of) Determinism was expressed by me, some nine or ten
years ago, in a short unpublished paper read (as a text for
discussion) before the now defunct Metaphysical Society ;
and as the position there taken up seems to me still worth
insisting on, whether as regards the special question or in
the more general reference opened out at the close, I will
venture to submit to the readers of Mind the paper in its
original form (though if I were writing now I would alter
some expressions).2 It ran as follows :—
" When a man wills, it is common to say that he acts under
some motive or motives. The expression, like other popular
sayings about mind, has an objective or materialistic impli-
cation. As one ball may be motive, or the motor, of another,
so a man is supposed to be put in motion, or determined to
1 Mind, vii. 567.
2 In one or two sentences of the last paragraph but one, the thought
resembles that to which Mr. Spencer had already given expression in
the Principles of Psychology (i. § 219), published a year or two before,
but I was not aware of this at the time.
THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES. 245
act, by something other than himself. Not that even in
the common apprehension a distinction is not made between
the moving of a man and the moving of a ball : a man is
often seen to act, as it is said, of himself or of his own
motion ; when there is a motive supplied from with-
out, this need not be a thing thought of as in any way
moved ; and any such motive is plainly seen to have its
effect conditioned by the nature of a man in a fashion to
which the inertia of a ball furnishes only the faintest
analogy. But yet the general analogy is understood to
hold, and very many cases of human volition admit of
being described according to it well enough for all practical
purposes. It provides a kind of reason for the uniformity
and constancy which men find, and are most interested to
find, in the acts of their fellows. The variety and incon-
stancy also found, people deal with in practice as they best
can, and do not pretend to explain.
"The expression, however, has further been drawn into the
scientific or philosophic theory of will, being assumed alike
by the determinist and the indeterminist for their opposite
readings of the psychological process of volition. These
theorists have in dispute between them what seems a
strictly philosophical issue, and the only one involved in
the secular question as to free-will. The determinist, or,
to use Priestley's word, the necessarian, declares that
volition is always wholly determined by motives, — that
in some motive or motives the sufficient reason, or efficient
cause, of every voluntary act is contained. On the other
hand, the indeterminist contends that there is also the ego
or will itself to be reckoned with ; the ego may pass into
action without motive, and with motives present is always
called, if proceeding rationally, to decide which among the
motives should be yielded to. The consciousness of such a
power of self-determination, either absolute or with reference
to some particular motive which thus acquires an efficacy
not its own, is the point perhaps most strongly urged by
the indeterminist. It is replied by the other that the
rational choice or supposed self-determination is only the
coming into play of some other motive.
" Looking at the two theories from without, I cannot but
246 THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES.
think that the determinist, with his causation by motives,
fails to take due account of the subject that is determined.
Call motive to a particular action some present or repre-
sented feeling which the action will in the one case sustain
or in the other bring on, and, in yielding to the motive or
in its determining to the act, what is that which yields or
is determined '? Whether named subject, mind, ego, or will,
it must be supposed something with a nature of its own,
through which it will co-operate with the motive towards
the resulting act ; and this doubtless is what the indeter-
minist has in view, when he urges his counter-theory. But
is the counter-theory, as it is expressed, less open to criticism?
Hardly ; for the terms employed to express the relation
between the feeling and the act are in truth equally appli-
cable to that which comes of the co-operation of the mind
or ego. If the feeling is in any strict sense a motive to the
act, the so-called rational determination, through which, let
us suppose, the feeling is overcome and the particular act is
deliberately repressed, can perfectly well be ascribed to the
intervention of other motives. The determination, being
rational, has its grounds ; nor would it be without motive,
even though it sprang from mere caprice. This a clear-
headed thinker like Hamilton, himself no necessarian, is
not only constrained to allow, but forward to assert against
such an advocate for free-will, not clear-headed, as Reid,
and accordingly he finds the moral liberty of the indeter-
minist wholly inconceivable. It is true that nevertheless
he is able for himself to accept it as a fact upon the direct
testimony of consciousness.
"From the presence of such difficulty in each of the
theories it would be wrong to infer that their antagonism
is more apparent than real — more real and profound it
could not be ; but we may suspect that for one or for the
other the difficulty arises from a defect in the language
employed by both, and with a different statement would
vanish. Such defect appears to lie in the word ' motive,'
which may have a serviceable application in the popular
view of man and the world, but has no scientific, which
is to say here psychological, value whatever. In the
common apprehension, a man is an object among objects,
THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES. 247
acted upon by and reacting upon them, and only irregularly
or vaguely is any account taken of the subjective conditions
under which the reaction, when voluntary, takes place.
Language, as begotten of common needs, follows suit, and
consistently enough, at least for practice, speaks of a man
as acting under motives, or of motives as influencing a man.
Very naturally, then, when there is a beginning made of
psychology, and mental states as such have to be considered,
is the popular expression diverted from its original and
proper reference to man as a physical object, and employed
with a reference to mind, or still more specially to will, as
if the mental states had a separate subsistence therefrom.
But however natural, surely this is a most improper trans-
ference. In no strict sense can the feeling to sustain or
bring on which an act is performed, be called a motive to
that act as a psychological state. The feeling and the
willing of the act are two successive moments in conscious-
ness, and that seems the whole psychological statement of
the case. Or, to be more particular, if the act is willed
directly upon the feeling (present or represented) being
had, that can only mean that a representation of action
associated with the feeling becomes actualised, or passes
into action present. If, on the other hand, it happens
that, in spite of the feeling, the act is not willed, but either
it is willed that the act be not done, or something else is
willed, or there arises a state of mental suspense, — that
can only mean that some other feelings and ideas have
supervened in consciousness, and have acted themselves
out or not, as the case may be. But from this point of
view there is no more any question of an ego to be reckoned
with for explanation of the volition. No doubt reference to
a mind, ego or will, apart from the particular conscious
states, is still possible, and not only possible, but under the
conditions of language inevitable, for conscious state must
be held to imply something of which it is the state, as much
as motive implies something that is moved. Here, however,
the reference is one of mere expression, which leaves the
psychological explanation unaffected. While the correlate
of a motive is truly a distinct thing objectively, to be
separately allowed for, it is quite otherwise with the ego
•248 THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES.
or mind, and a fortiori the will, spoken of as the subject of
particular conscious states. A feeling which is a state of
the ego, is the ego in a certain state, and not less the ego
because the state at the particular moment might conceiv-
ably have been a different one, and does, in fact, the next
moment give place to one that is different. Or, if a con-
scious state is not that, what is it ? Now, with no ego left
that can modify the succession of states as they emerge, to
discover the psychological law 'of the succession is to give
all the explanation that is possible of volition. The matter
would then stand thus : If so-called motives are not under-
stood as definite mental states, they are of no account for
the psychological explanation of will, and any theory of their
action, deterministic or indeterministic, is unphilosophical.
If they are so understood, they should in psychology be
so expressed, and the theory of indeterminism, or more
properly the doctrine of free-will, becomes untenable. It
is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego
already determinate ; but such an ego, though it may be
logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a real
factor in psychology.
" The argument has this moral : that, if mental philosophy
must use a language devised for purposes other than philo-
sophical, it cannot be too careful about the inferences it
founds upon the words. Even the objective sciences, as
they advance, drift farther and farther away from the use
of popular expressions, and beget a technical language of
their own. Psychology only, though as subjective science
it can least of all be served by common speech, developed
as that has been with an almost exclusively objective regard,
tries to work without such technical aid. This is not
surprising, because, if it were sought to devise an appropriate
and perfectly consistent language for the results of psycho-
logical analysis, it would differ so profoundly from common
speech as to be unintelligible, even in its principle, to all
but adepts ; whereas in other sciences, however abstract,
at least the principle is perfectly intelligible to people in
general, and in most of them the difference is only one of
greater constancy and precision in the use of the verbal or
written signs employed. But the consequence is that, while
THE ACTION OF SO-CALLED MOTIVES. '249
popular conceptions and misconceptions do not gain a footing
in the objective sciences or can be easily extruded if they
do, mental philosophy has always been more or less tinctured
by an admixture of popular opinion, not rendered more philo-
sophic by being refined upon. There have been writers of
no small repute who never could place themselves at the
philosophical point of view, and there are no thinkers who,
when it comes to expression, do not find it difficult or even
impossible to maintain consistently the philosophical attitude.
With language what it is, this must always remain so ; but
the greater is the need to signalise the difficulty and the
danger. "
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.1
I DESIRE to offer, in the following pages, some remarks on
a question that has found definite expression from the time
of Kant, if not earlier, and that claimed attention before now
in a journal calling itself a Review of Psychology and Philo-
sophy. Though not wholly passed by in the few words of
general preface with which Mind was started seven years
ago, the question how Psychology and Philosophy are re-
lated to one another, so as to be coupled at all and coupled
in this particular order, deserves at this time a more careful
consideration. But, after an editorial experience of so many
years, a preliminary word or two of retrospect over the
course that is past will not be thought irrelevant to the
present discussion. How far does experience seem to have
justified the idea of founding a philosophical journal in
England and making it in the first place psychological ?
I will not conceal my own feeling of disappointment that
there has not been more of positive contribution to psycho-
logical science in its pages. If they have faithfully reflected
the amount of psychological activity in the country, it can-
not be said that this has been appreciably increased in the
last seven years, because of the opportunity here afforded to any
psychologist of bringing the results of his inquiry under the
notice of other students. The Journal has not yet suc-
ceeded in fostering — if it might have been expected to foster —
such habits of specialised investigation in psychology as are
characteristic of the workers in other departments of science.
There is little sign in our midst of the disposition (or,
perhaps, the ability) to work on such special lines of psycho-
logical research as other countries give evidence of.2 In-
vestigations like those which are being systematically pur-
sued at Leipsic and elsewhere in Germany are not yet
1 Mind, viii. 1.
2 Exception should be made for Mr. F. Gallon's researches on Generic
Images and on Automatic [Representation, noticed in Mind, iv. 551, the
former of the two being followed up by him in Mind, v. 301 .
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. '251
undertaken in any of our universities or colleges ; and
monographs on particular phases of mental life have been
notably more frequent of late in France (as well as in Ger-
many) than in this country.1 The reason is, perhaps, not
far to seek. Our academic posts are few altogether, and
have in general such multifarious duties attached to them as do
not favour the concentration required for this kind of work.
But the disposition is, after all, the main thing, and here it
is to be noted that in so far as it is still the influence of
what is called the "English Psychology " that maintains
the interest there is amongst us in the positive investigation
of mind, this does not tell in the way of stimulating to
special inquiry. For all the name it has made in the world,
English psychology has never been remarkable for its
elaboration in detail. Some few special questions it has
been led by historic circumstances, if not by accident, to
investigate in a more thorough way ; but in the main its
reputation has been founded on the enunciation of general
principles which, while directly psychological in their im-
port, have been thought of rather for the philosophical
application to which they appeared to lend themselves.
Treatises on Man or Human Nature, Essays or Inquiries on
Understanding generally, Analyses of Mind in all its aspects
—these have formed the staple of English productions in
this field. So, at the present time, it is rather the recon-
sideration of the psychological point of view, whether in
reference to philosophy or in reference to the range of
mental inquiry as newly enlarged by the biological principle
of evolution ; or it is the revision of the whole psycho-
logical field with a view to including and ordering the great
mass of new facts that have been brought to light, chiefly
from the physiological side ; or, again, it is the application
(too long delayed) of psychological principles to the practical
work of education — it is these various tasks that are now
engaging the attention of those who set store by the tradition
of '' English Psychology ". But there is other work to be done
also, and we shall soon fall too far behind in the scientific race
if we have not our own record of positive results to show.
1 Mr. Gurney's elaborate Power of Sound is one instance of the kind of
special treatise here meant ; Mr. Sully's Illusions is another.
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
Otherwise, it may perhaps be claimed that the past
volumes of Mind have not succeeded one another to no
purpose. They have kept English readers, for the last
seven years, better informed than they would else have been
of the psychological and philosophical movements in other
countries, and they have given a representation that cannot
be called other than impartial of the manifold currents of
thought running among the English-speaking race here and
in America. If at times some forms of opinion have seemed
to assert themselves more than others, the fault lay with the
others that chose to assert themselves less. It became clear
from the beginning that the number of English thinkers, at
the present day, who cared to have a clearly denned psycho-
logical basis was very small : not that any can be without
their psychology, but that most are of opinion either that it
supplies no basis for philosophical consideration or that they
can get on very well without thought of it. All who had
anything serious to say have, therefore, from the first been
encouraged to deliver themselves of their message, whatever
it might be ; and while I reflect with satisfaction that the
chief opponent, in this generation, of the English philoso-
phical tradition was using the Journal for the exposition of
his matured conclusions when a cruel fate snapt on a sudden
the thread of his life, I can truly say that no philosophical
contribution offered has ever been declined on the ground
. of its being of one cast of thought rather than of another.
As this has been the rule in the past, so is there a fixed deter-
mination that it shall be in the future. Nor does compre-
hensiveness of this kind mean philosophical indifference —
the absence of all conviction in one who seeks to practise it.
It may, perhaps, be taken rather as a sign of understanding
that in philosophy there is room for differences of view,
which need clearing in relation to one another while they
remain differences. There is urgent need, in the present
state of philosophical speculation, for that free and direct
interchange of thought from opposite sides which Mind has
done something to promote and may yet do more. Mutual
understanding — not agreement — is the object to be first
striven for. It is with some thought of helping in that
direction that the following pages are now written.
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. '253
When Psychology is distinguished from Philosophy and
the question is raised whether there is any special relation
of the one to the other, it is Empirical Psychology that is
to be understood — the science of mind worked out in the
way of the natural sciences, if not regarded as itself one of
them : Rational Psychology has always been taken as philo-
sophical or nothing. Now of empirical psychology Kant, in
a well-known passage near the close of the Kritik d. r. V.
(' Architectonic of Pure Reason '), has declared that it is
nothing to philosophy proper or metaphysic, any more than
the empirical study of nature is ; or that if it may continue
to get a little attention from the philosopher, this is only
upon sufferance, and until it is taken vigorously in hand by
the specialist and turned into Anthropology, as a complete
scientific doctrine of man.
It is a remarkable saying of Kant's, and not least remark-
able is the prospect held out of a wider science of man
within which any scientific psychology must fall. The
declaration as to Anthropology proves — more than his own
treatise on this subject, full of genuine observation as it is —
how thoroughly he understood what work had to be done in
the way of science for a comprehension of human nature :
no mere collecting and sifting of objective facts, but also
work of psychological (subjective) analysis conducted ac-
cording to the methods of positive scientific inquiry. Nor.
in denying philosophical import to psychology, was Kant in
the least unaware of the special claims that might be set up
for the science in this respect. He begins the passage by a
reference to the expectations which in that very age had
been formed, that psychology might be able to achieve for
metaphysical insight what the method of a priori speculation
was being abandoned for having failed to effect. Kant, we
know, had himself for a time shared the opinion, borrowed
from German psychologists of that day, like Tetens and
others, more perhaps than from Hume and Locke, that a
scientific doctrine of mind must be placed first in any philo-
sophical discipline. But also from Locke and to some
extent from Hume (at least Hume of the Inquiry) he had
had occasion to learn what they had to urge to the same
effect ; and if, in the end, he declares roundly that nieta-
254 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
physic has nothing to do with psychology, it is done with
his eyes hardly less open than if he had had before him all
that later psychologists of whatever different schools —
British or Continental — have since sought to demonstrate
to the contrary. At the same time, it is of interest as well
as to the point to remember that Kant himself lies under
the imputation of remaining too much influenced by the
idea with which he was once infected that psychology is
the foundation of all genuine philosophy. If some regret
that he ever outgrew the idea and did not spend himself in
giving it effect, others find in the rags and tatters of psycho-
logical doctrine which he could never throw off, the expla-
nation of all his shortcomings as a philosopher.
It is certainly to Locke that we must go back to find the
beginnings of the opinion that philosophy should start from
what is now called (though Locke did not call it) psycho-
logical inquiry. There is in Hobbes, in the previous genera-
tion, more express inquiry of the psychological sort, but
not pursued with any such directly philosophical purpose.
Locke, with the definite aim of furnishing a theory of the
validity and limits of knowledge, elects to proceed by what
he calls the " plain historical way " of a consideration of its
origin ; in other words, he seeks to solve the philosophical
question of the import of knowledge by reference to the
psychological question of its coming-to-pass. The idea
worked so powerfully that, in the next generation, we find
Berkeley solving the religious question of the relation of the
creature to the Creator through a philosophical theory of
knowing and being suggested by a special inquiry in the
psychology of vision ; and Hume, in turn, declaring that,
while even such sciences as mathematics are in a manner
dependent on the science of man, this is still more true of
properly "philosophical researches," which can be conducted
only after a scientific understanding of human nature, to be
attained by the same way of '' experience and observation "
as had been found effective in other sciences. When Hume
thus wrote, Locke's idea of psychological inquiry had been
caught up in a still more positive spirit by Hartley, and
through Hartley more than Hume it has worked upon those
who in this century have advanced farther upon the way of
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 255
thinking that has become stamped as characteristically
English. Even the reaction against Hume's philosophical
conclusions, in Scotland, started from a not less emphatic
assertion of the need of resting philosophy upon an inductive
science of mind ; and meanwhile, by the middle of last
century, Locke's idea was being ardently worked out also in
France, Germany and Italy. It was thrown into the shade
by the Kantian conception of Critical philosophy and re-
mained in abeyance during the whole period of eager
speculation that followed ; but all the while, in Germany,
psychology was making way as positive science by the
labours of Herbart and his school, and in time it came again,
first through Beneke (under the direct influence of Locke)
and afterwards in connexion with the forward movement of
physiological science giving a new definiteness to psycho-
logical results, to be regarded as of special significance for
philosophy.
What is, then, the exact import of the idea thus intro-
duced by Locke into the stream of philosophical thought?
It is (so far as philosophy turns upon the problems of know-
ledge) that, before attempting to determine what can be
known ultimately of things, investigation shall be made of
the human faculty of knowing by the same method that has
been found effective in the region of the positive sciences.
Locke was deeply impressed by the scientific achievements
of his century, culminating in the work of Newton, and,
while declaring that for himself philosophy is turned from
direct speculation about things into general theory of know-
ledge as complementary to the special sciences, he is most
of all decided on the point that such philosophical theory can
be wrought out only after scientific account has been
rendered of mind. This is his really characteristic idea ;
for the conception of philosophy as theory of knowledge in
relation to the sciences is equally proclaimed by Kant later
and had already been shadowed out earlier by Descartes.
To arrive at philosophical conclusions that might the more
readily command assent because drawn from a basis of
properly scientific results about mind, which could no more
be contested than any results of mathematical or physical
science — such is the idea of Locke and his followers. It
256 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
gets the pointed expression before quoted from Hume, and
it has determined the form of all homespun English thought
ever since. It is not that in putting psychological con-
siderations in the front the English thinkers have eschewed
the work of philosophy ; for they have never hesitated
to pronounce on ultimate questions, it being rather their
conception of the range and limits of psychology that has
remained uncertain. But there has been a common per-
suasion among them that there is need of a definite scientific
platform from which to start upon the search for philoso-
phical comprehension, if anything that can be called know-
ledge— more than subjective opinion — is to come of the
quest. So far, again, as philosophy is to provide guidance
as well as insight — has in view not only rational interpreta-
tion but conduct and aspiration — here also the thought has
been that beginning should be made with scientific investi-
gation of the processes of feeling or impulse natural to man.
The idea, however, is one thing, and another thing is the
carrying of it out. It may be possible, as we shall see, to
maintain in the present scientific era the advantage or even
necessity of basing philosophical consideration upon psycho-
logical inquiry, and yet it may be allowed that the idea, as
originally struck out at another time of strenuous advance in
science, has never hitherto been circumspectly enough put
in practice. Locke and his followers to the present day
have proceeded in a manner that has laid them open to a
kind of criticism that apparently makes an end of their
pretensions to rank as a serious philosophical school. The
criticism directed by Green against Locke and Hume tells
also, as it was plainly meant to tell, against Mill and others
in this generation who, working at philosophy from the
standing-ground of psychology and making whatever pro-
gress in either department, have been hardly more careful
than Hume or Locke to draw a clear line between natural
science of mind (or man) and the ulterior consideration of
things in relation to mind. The point of the criticism
urged by Green (after Kant), with a massive persistence
that stamps it as an original philosophical achievement, is
too well known — repeated as the argument has lately been
in these pages — to need more than general indication.
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. '2~)7 '
Locke and the others are charged with assuming for the
explanation of mental experience that which is itself
unintelligible except as the result of a mental function..
They would account for mental experience, including
thought, by supposing a world of ' objects ' acting upon a
mind or a multitude of minds, when it can be shown that
the very things or objects assumed are themselves mental
constructions dependent on the activity of that thought
which is in this way to be explained. The moral is that in
no such way as the English school has trodden can the
work of philosophy be performed, but only by a path at
least as different as that which Kant had in view, when he
scouted the notion that the least philosophical importance
could be attached to psychological (or anthropological)
science.
So far as it bears against Locke in particular, the criticism,
it must be allowed, is not to be repelled, — if it were any-
body's business at this time of day to defend the language
Or the thought of his Essay, so wavering and uncertain as
both plainly are. Indeed, it is one view to take of the
work of his immediate successors, Berkeley and Hume,
that they did something to obviate, by anticipation, the
objections that can be urged with incontrovertible force
against his shifting positions. But neither did Berkeley
and Hume define their ground with sufficient care, nor
proceed far enough in the way of systematic construction,
to evade the criticism as it was to be levelled also against
them. Berkeley with his religious and Hume with his
dialectical aim had neither of them in view, to the same
extent as Locke himself, a positive solution of the philoso-
phical problem of knowledge in keeping with the facts of
psychological science. If no more could be said for the new
method in philosophy than they were at pains to urge, there
was need enough for Kant's newer way. As for the later
English thinkers, if they continued to maintain the psycho
logical starting-point, they were bound at least to bring
their doctrine face to face with Kant's theory of knowledge
in detail, since never before, from any point of view, had the
work of philosophical analysis been carried so far. Their
failure to do this has, more than anything else, weakened
17
258 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
the impression that might otherwise have been wrought by
the signal advances they have made or rendered possible in
constructive interpretation beyond their pre-Kantian com-
patriots. And thus the hostile criticism directed against
these has seemed by no means wanting in point against
themselves. Can it in any way be met ?
Those who would still in these days cling to the English
tradition or rather uphold the idea of it all the more in the
changed conditions of the time — changed alike by the
widened scientific inquiry and by the deepened philosophical
thought of the last hundred years — may (as it seems to me)
materially strengthen their position by making more express
distinction of Psychology and Philosophy than has been
usual in this country. It' is a mistake to think of psycho-
logy because it is concerned with mind, or natural science
of man, because it deals with man, as meeting all the re-
quirements of philosophy. Nor is the difficulty met by such
a vague use of the word Metaphysics as satisfied Mill (as
well as Hamilton and Mansel) : the name is misleading when
applied to psychology, and confusing when it is held to
justify the conjoint treatment of epistemological or onto-
logical with psychological questions. ' Philosophy of Mind '
or ' Mental Philosophy ' might seem to lend itself better to
the double use, because it may stand for psychology like
4 Natural Philosophy ' (in the English usage, after Newton)
for physics, while opening for the first time a vista of ulte-
rior or deeper consideration in the word Philosophy ; but
nothing is gained by the attempt to combine under one
designation what it is of the first importance, for clearness
of view, to separate. Till psychology and philosophy are
kept well apart, neither the one nor the other can have full
justice done to it. Any advantage there may be in passing
to the one through the other is certainly imperiled, if there
is the least pretence made >that the psychology is already
philosophy. Let us, first, try to define the true character
and position of Psychology, and if we find it to be science of
altogether exceptional scope, bringing it into special relation
with philosophy, let us next determine the meaning that
may be attached to Philosophy in relation to psychology.
Psychology, by itself, is, in the first instance, positive
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 259
phenomenal science — positive as to its method, phenomenal
as to its subject-matter. Its method does not differ from
that of other positive sciences, like biology or chemistry,
except as the method of any science is modified by the
peculiarity of its subject. As phenomenal science, it is occu-
pied with a particular class of facts, taken just as they
present themselves. Phenomenal facts are appearances
(aspects) of things, or occurrences in things as they appear.
What is the meaning of ' thing ' or ' appearance ' or ' aspect '
—these are questions which the particular science dealing
with any class of facts leaves wholly aside. In so proceeding,
the sciences may all be said to begin quite arbitrarily, because
the questions are real and remain open ; but the method is
justified by the results. It is notorious that all the positive
sciences, from mathematics onwards, have become consti-
tuted and made way just as they have cut themselves loose
from that kind of deeper inquiry. Psychology, too, is science
only upon those terms. Not that, in placing it thus far on
a level with the other sciences, we commit ourselves to the
position that mind is merely such another aspect of things
after life (the subject of biology), as life is after material
constitution (the subject of chemistry), or material constitu-
tion is after motion (the subject of physics). It will pre-
sently be argued that there is something in Mind, as the
subject-matter of psychology, unlike anything else, that sug-
gests the need of some other kind of consideration ; while
the fact, evident from the first, that the events or states (or
however they are called) which psychology investigates, are
apprehended only in the peculiar attitude of introspection,
makes already a profound difference. Still there is a definite
sense in which we may speak of mental phenomena as of
vital, structural or other phenomena ; and in this sense we
are entitled, nay bound, from the scientific point of view, to
make all necessary assumptions, were it only to get language
in which to state our results.
The psychologist seeks to assign the natural conditions
under which mental experience, as we are each (subjectively)
aware of it, arises or comes to pass. For this he as readily
assumes ' objects ' (in the sense of material things) as any
other man of science, and with as little prejudice to the
260 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
deeper question what an ' object ' is or how it can be known.
It is plain fact that, but for the presence of what we call
external objects in relation with the bodily organism (an-
other object, also in its way external), certain of the mental
events which the psychologist has to study — those that are
called by the general name of Sense — do not come to pass.
There is no way of rendering a scientific account of these
(that shall be more than a bare subjective description) except
in terms of the physical circumstances plainly involved.
The circumstances, when more closely examined, are found
to consist of physiological processes in an organism, in rela-
tion with such physical processes as science discovers upon
resolution of the 'objects' of our common or natural expe-
rience. Advanced so far as to substitute the exacter expres-
sion for the vague opinion of common life that our bodies
are somehow implicated with other bodies in the production
of conscious experience, the psychologist has then obtained
a definite clue for the scientific resolution of the whole
complex of mental experience which offers itself to intro-
spective observation. Those facts of mental life (subjectively
apprehended) are first to be dealt with where there is a clear
evidence of physiological process that can be assigned, and
afterwards those where the physical conditions are of a more
hypothetical character but can- yet be imagined in continuity
with those that are more evident ; the same order of treat-
ment (from Sense, through Perception and Representative
Imagination, to Thought), once it is thus suggested, being
confirmed by reference to the historical development of the
individual and the race. Nor are the results arrived at less
purely psychological because of the regard had to physical
conditions. It is not the mere fact of natural concomitance
between physical event and mental event that is in this way
to be established, though it is of scientific interest and im-
portance to ascertain the particulars of such concomitance,
as a subsidiary result of the inquiry. The psychologist's
reference to physical conditions, so far as it can be carried
through, is everywhere made for the elucidation of the facts
of subjective consciousness. It is these that he aims at
classifying with a view to explanation, and the explanation
consists at last in the establishment of laws of mind — laws
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 261
which are ' natural,' but still of subjective import. There
is thus a perfectly legitimate ' natural science ' of mind (or
man), against which, so long as it gives itself out for nothing
else, there lies no more objection than against any other
positive science. It is a legitimate and also, from any point
of view, a necessary task to determine the conditions under
which and the manner in which our conscious experience
(as iiitrospectively observed) naturally proceeds. The cir-
cumstance that the peculiar attitude of introspection must
be taken up before the facts to be accounted for are appre-
hended, complicates the inquiry with special difficulties but
does not alter the methodological conditions under which it
may, and (if it will be scientific) must, be pursued.
But if psychology is thus, in its way, natural science, it is
more also, or rather it leads to more. Mind, however it
may be taken as the name for a peculiar class of (subjective)
phenomena in relation with other (objective) phenomena,
has also a wider implication. The ' other phenomena ' —
meaning such 'objects' or objective appearances as physical
science investigates out of all relation to the fact of their
appearing — have, as the very name ' phenomenon ' implies,
their mental aspect. They may be viewed as themselves
part of our mental experience : not that this can happen at
the moment when they are being taken as the physical con-
ditions of the subjective facts which as psychologists we are
for the time investigating, but that they can in turn be con-
sidered as subjective facts to be investigated. The object
(physically understood) which as acting upon the organism
gives the only means of stating in scientific terms how we
come, naturally, to have such a subjective experience as we
call sensation, cannot fail, in the course of the inquiry, to
appear as itself also matter for psychological consideration.
To be regarded as the condition of our having, in certain
circumstances, the particular kind of conscious experience
called sense, it must come within conscious ken ; that
is to say, it admits of statement in terms of another
kind of conscious experience called perception, which has
equally to be treated by the psychologist. Or the case may
be put otherwise, thus. The psychologist, in giving account
of sensation as a rudimentary kind of subjective experience,
262 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
has to face the question how sensations appear all, more or
less, as objectively referred or projected in an extended order
— some appearing so much as sensible qualities of external
bodies that it is only by an express eifort that they can be
thought of as sensations, others appearing indeed as sensa-
tions but thought and spoken of as ' bodily ' from being
either localised definitely on the surface of the organism or
vaguely referred to some internal part. This is tine psychologi-
cal (as opposed to the philosophical or metaphysical) question
of Perception, admitting, when so stated, of a strictly scien-
tific solution. But what a transformation does such an
extension of the psychologist's view not work ! Not a
single physical object or fact, as given in common experi-
ence or investigated in natural science, or again as assumed
for psychological science itself, but now presents itself as a
problem to be solved in terms of properly psychological,
which is to say, conscious experience. There is, obviously,
no science like this Psychology, whose subject-matter, how-
ever at first distinguished from that of other sciences, is
seen, as we advance, to include (in a manner) the subjects
of them all ; which begins with assumptions like the other
sciences, but after a time turns round and investigates its
own assumptions as no other science does or can. Mathe-
matics, physics and all the rest do each their appointed work
and have nothing to say to the conditions under which their
own or the others' work is appointed. Psychology alone, in
doing its work, finds itself occupied (in a manner of its own)
with the very matter of the others. Number and space, motion,
material constitution, with every other aspect of things that is
or can be conceived to be the subject of direct positive investi-
gation, are in all their varied modes at the same time facts of
conscious experience — in all strictness, mental phenomena, of
whose elements and composition account may be rendered
from the psychological point of view. If such account may
be given, how can Psychology be spoken of as if it were only
one among the other sciences, touching the philosopher,
who comprehends things universally, no more nearly than
any other? Psychology is not philosophy, but with Mind
for its subject its scope cannot be less wide than the scope
of philosophy. That is not to be said of any other science.
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 263
It is no wonder, indeed, that psychologists have slipped
into philosophical consideration as other men of science
have not, or that those philosophers who set store by scien-
tific psychology have not been too careful to distinguish and
separate the one kind of consideration from the other. If
philosophy is, on the theoretic side, the comprehension of
things as known, and, on the practical side, the valuation of
things as ends to be striven for, what more natural than
that the scientific investigation of the various phases of our
complex mental life — distinguished, so far as they can be
distinguished, under such heads as knowing, feeling and
willing — should be mixed up with or have mixed up with it
the philosophic inquiry? The conjunction is much to be
deprecated, when we see how it gives occasion for groundless
objections against the method of psychology as science. It
is equally to be deprecated, if it can be shown to impede the
free exercise of philosophical thought. But the fact that
psychology and philosophy so readily intertwine is surely an
indication of some special affinity between them. Let us
now take up the question of their relation from the side of
Philosophy. We have seen psychology refuse, because of its
subject, to be classed as merely one science among the
others. How shall we understand Philosophy in relation to
the sciences generally, and more especially in relation to
that science of psychology whose scope widens out into an
all-comprehensiveness vying with that of philosophy itself?
Locke, who first, in whatever inarticulate fashion, pro-
claimed the necessity of starting with psychology, had a
clear notion of the function of Philosophy in general, which
his followers have too much lost sight of, some in their
efforts to improve his psychological ground-work, others in
their predominant concern to work out special theories of
ethics or of logic from psychological data. If we discount
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature because of its equivocal
import, there has not been since Locke's Essay any work of
comparable range in general philosophy produced by an
English thinker from the psychological point of view. Be-
yond psychology, English thinkers have occupied themselves
mainly with Ethics, till Mill in his Logic essayed the special
philosophical task of providing a theory of scientific proof;
'264 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
or if the present day has witnessed more than one notable
achievement in general philosophical construction, these
have not been projected directly, if at all, upon Lockian
lines. Locke's notion of philosophy is of a general Theory
of Knowledge wrought out, with psychological data, as com-
plementary to the positive sciences. While this or that
science is concerned with a particular department of experi-
ence or aspect of things as we find them, it is the business
of philosophy to investigate the possible range of experience,
to distinguish between what can and what cannot be known,
and in particular to determine the conditions and content of
real knowledge- -all upon foregone psychological inquiry of
the positive sort. Now this is the view of philosophy (on its
theoretic or speculative side) that will force itself most
directly upon any one who, being interested in mind as a
subject of science among other subjects of science, cannot
help seeing that mind has also a deeper implication which
no positive science can resolve.
Apart from any question of psychology, it is notorious that
(speculative) philosophy has in modern times changed its
character from a theory of Being into a theory of Knowing.
This has been mainly due to the rise and development of
the positive sciences, as appears not less clearly in Kant's
than in Locke's statement of the philosophical problem.
The sciences are there as so many bodies of coherent doc-
trine about this or that kind of fact. The more special of
them presuppose and are advanced by help of the more
general, but, as has been already remarked in another con-
nexion, not one of them (always excepting psychology) has
any light to throw upon the matter or assumptions of the
others. They employ a language which none of them
(unless, again, psychology) is in any way able to explain :
'object,' 'thing,' 'substance,' 'quality,' 'aspect,' 'pheno-
menon,' ' relation,' ' cause,' &c., &c. — how can any of the
sciences proceed without the use of such words as these, but
which of the sciences has any account to give of them ?
Clearly, then, there is just as much need of a theory of the
conditions of knowing anything as there is of a theory of
this or that kind of thing. The theory of this or that kind
of thing (as found) is what we call a science. The further
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 265
indispensable theory of what the meaning of science or any
kind of knowledge is, may or must be called Philosophy. So
far all are agreed who will think of philosophy in relation to
science ; and not only (though more) in modern times, for,,
with a less definite conception of special science, Aristotle
;also had his view of ' First Philosophy ' as general theory
of knowledge. Consider now the science of psychology in
particular. Psychology also, as dealing with a special kind
of fact, needs to be supplemented (as science) by philosophical
consideration. But psychological fact includes the very
function of knowing, which is the subject of philosophy. A
different statement of the relation of philosophy to psycho-
logy is, then, required than in the case of other science.
There it was enough to say that philosophy has the task of
analysing to the bottom the conceptions and assumptions
which the sciences generally or any sciences in particular
employ without being able to give account of them ;
being thus fundamental theory of science while science is
theory of things as they appear. Here, where the particular
science (psychology) and philosophy have both to do with
the fact or function of knowing, the statement must be that
they have a different kind of account to give of it. And
there is room for such difference. When psychology has ex-
plained knowledge as a phase of conscious experience natur-
ally conditioned, there remains for philosophy the question
of its import or validity as knowledge.
The distinction may, first, be made plain by an example.
As we have already had occasion to note, the psychologist is
met at the earliest stage of his inquiry, when treating of
sense, by the remarkable fact that sensations, which he
must regard by themselves, analytically, as purely subjective
states of feeling (arising in physical and physiological cir-
cumstances that can be assigned), do yet appear in actual
experience with varying characters — some vaguely and others
definitely referred to parts of the physical organism, while
still others are projected so as to appear naturally as qualities
of external things. We need not pause now to state the
case in all its variety more exactly : it is met by the psycho-
logical distinction of perception (sense-perception) from sen-
sation, perception being a cognitive or intellectual process
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
resulting in what are best called percepts. A percept is a
particular fact of intellectual experience, as singled out for
investigation — when it can be proved to be essentially com-
plex, however apparently simple. Now in any such percept,
as, for example, a definitely limited portion of space, or a
particular object in space with a variety of sensible qualities,
the psychologist's interest ends when he has shown' what
elements (not further analysable) of sense it involves and
under what laws these come to be so ordered or fused as
they appear in natural experience. The psychologist's in-
terest ends and just then the philosopher's interest begins.
Both agree in regarding the portion of space or sensible
object as percept, that is to say, as fact of conscious experi-
ence, not (as in physical investigation or common life) as
fact or thing out of relation to mind. But while the psy-
chologist has in view the percept only as it is perceived and
explains howr the perceiving comes to pass (in me or in you),
the philosopher asks what the perceiving imports (for you
and me equally) — in particular whether it means or need
mean, as it is commonly taken to mean, a thing independent
of the perception of either of us. What is the space or
object that we perceive ? What more is there in it as per-
ceived, than as fancied ? If said to be real or objectively
valid (as a subjective fancy is not), what makes it so? These
and the like questions, which it is not for the psychologist
to answer (though it were allowed that he can best put them
in train for answer), touch the very heart of what we mean
by Knowledge. We may view knowledge as mere subjective
function, but it has its full meaning only as it is taken to
represent what we may call objective fact, or is such as is
named (in different circumstances) real, valid, true. As
mere subjective function, which it is to the psychologist, it
is best spoken of by an unambiguous name, and for this
there seems none better than Intellection. We may then
nay that psychology is occupied with the natural function of
Intellection, seeking to discover its laws and distinguishing
its various modes (perception, representative imagination,
conception, &c.) according to the various circumstances in
which the laws are found at work. Philosophy, on the
other hand, is theory of Knowledge (as that which is known).
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. >2(i7
But, if we thus take philosophy as Theory of Knowledge,
beyond psychology, it needs to be denned on other sides
also :' in relation to Logic, accepted as this has been for
philosophical doctrine by none more expressly than by Mill
and others among the later representatives of the psycho-
logical school ; and, again, in relation to Metaphysic, the
most widely accepted synonym for anything that can be
called Philosophy. What we may leave aside, on the pre-
sent occasion, is the question what other definite lines of
philosophical thought are opened up for the psychologist by
the other phases of mental life which he distinguishes, from
Intellection, as Feeling and Will. It, of course, follows that
there are such other lines, when it is seen how the psycho-
logy of Intellection passes into philosophical Theory of
Knowledge ; but the present object is not to lay out the
whole philosophical field — only to indicate a point of view.
There is special need of distinction between Logic and
Theory of Knowledge; for some (as Hegel) would use the
very name Logic for philosophy when conceived as Theory
of Knowledge, and others fas Mill), while retaining the
traditional conception of Logic, though widening it in a cer-
tain admissible way, are found importing into the exposition
(as in Mill's^chapter iii., "Of Things denoted by Names'") a
series of considerations which are plainly extra-logical and
can only be called epistemological. And, from any point of
view, is not Logic a philosophical theory of knowledge?
What is valid knowledge '? When is knowledge valid so as
to command universal assent ? What is known truly and
what not truly ? These questions, which we have used to
express the problem of philosophy as opposed to psychology,
seem to apply equally to the problem of Logic. Logic is un-
doubtedly concerned with validity of knowledge. But know-
ledge to the logician is what is more particularly called
Thought ; some saying this expressly, others meaning
Thought generally when they adopt the more special name
of Reasoning, and others implying the same thing when
they speak of logic as having to do with validity of Inference
(formal and material) or the conditions of general Proof.
Now if we substitute the word Thought, which properly
means general intellection or intellection by way of concepts,
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
for the word Knowledge in the questions just repeated, to
make them more accurately express the subject-matter of
Logic, we get at once a clue to its distinctive feature an
compared with Theory of Knowledge.
Logic, while equally with Theory of Knowledge to be dis-
tinguished from psychology as occupied with the philo-
sophical question of validity, is to be distinguished from
Theory of Knowledge in having to do with the validity of
Thought only as it is general. This view of Logic, as having
for its subject the import of the generality of general know-
ledge, agrees either with the limited conception of the
doctrine as Pure or Formal Logic or with its range as
widened to include Applied or Material Logic. Even
when applied to this or that particular kind of matter, Logic
goes no further than to determine the conditions of valid
general statement (as deductively or inductively obtained) in
the particular kind of matter. It does not probe the deeper
questions remaining for Theory of Knowledge in regard to
any matter of thought. It belongs, for example, to Material
Logic to explain the form, mainly deductive, that geomet-
rical reasoning assumes and to determine the conditions of
the valid proof of general statements in geometry ; but what
space may in the last analysis be, whether it is a subjective
form of our sense-perception or has any kind of extra-
mental reality — these are questions which do not concern
the logician except in so far as the answer given to them in
ultimate philosophical analysis can be shown to affect the
question of the form of general statements in geometrical
science. This it very well may or indeed inevitably must
do : the present contention by no means is that Logic is not
related to Theory of Knowledge. Not only, in the view here
suggested, may Logic be regarded and treated as a special
department of the general philosophical theory, but, even
when constituted into a separate doctrine (sometimes called
a special science, though it is no science as mathematics and
the rest are), it may constantly have to reckon with episte-
mological considerations — as the practice of all logicians
shows who (like Mill) do not confine themselves to the mere
form of thought. All the same, it is not to be confounded
with Theory of Knowledge. It deals so exclusively with
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. '269
the one aspect (generality) of such knowledge as it deals
with at all that, unless it be denied that this should or can
be investigated apart, the line of demarcation is clear ; and
as it has not been doubted, from the time of Aristotle, that
the aspect is one that can be treated apart, so neither will
anybody doubt that it should be so treated who is interested
in making knowledge scientific and is alive to the fact that
it is of the essence of Science to be general.
If philosophy as Theory of Knowledge is thus perfectly
consistent with or even includes the traditional conception
of logic as a department of philosophical doctrine, we may
next see that it consists as well with the conception of philo-
sophy as Metaphysic, though taken in no sense short of
that which is otherwise expressed as Ontology or Theory of
Being. This sense of the word Metaphysic, historically best
justified, is also that which is suggested by analogy with the
meaning of Physic. Physic (in its widest application) is
concerned about the being of things as they appear — about
things only as they appear but yet as they appear to be.
Metaphysic, as going beyond Physic, has then to do with
the being of things as they are or with their being as the
ground of their appearing. But how can such a notion of
philosophy as ontological doctrine be entertained at this
time of day ? It is not only English psychologists, content
with their ' mental phenomena/ that have abjured ontolo-
gical consideration. When Kant substituted criticism of
pure reason for dogmatic assertions about a sphere of super-
sensible existence, did he not establish for evermore that not
Being but Knowledge was the proper subject of philosophy?
The critical inquiry which he thus put foremost did not,
however, preclude Kant from following it up with a ' Meta-
physic ' (of Nature as well as of Morals) as the proper fulfil-
ment of philosophy ; and nothing hinders the philosophic
thinker who begins by defining his task (in relation to
psychology) as Theory of Knowledge, from considering it as
Theory of Being (Ontology) also. The one, indeed, is in-
evitably the other. The thing that is known, is known to
be. The thing that is, is not otherwise than it is known.
What it is important to understand — what has come in the
progress of modern philosophy to be clearly understood — is,
'270 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
that no dogmatic assertion of Being is philosophically admis-
sible. Before it can be determined what in any ultimate
sense is, what the modes of Being are, it must first be deter-
mined what the modes of Knowing are, what in the ultimate
sense is known. This is the idea common to the Critical and
to the Psychological school of philosophy. But that is no
philosophy which, after considering, by one method or
another, what it is to know anything and what is or can be
known, starts back from declaring what then must be
understood really to be. Philosophy has not only to give
the ultimate analysis of things in abstract terms (of subje'c-
tive import), but must render account of the concrete
realities of everyday experience, which in the truest sense
are for us all because it is to them (animate or inanimate)
that all human interest attaches — because it is they only
that are conceived as having an intrinsic or extrinsic worth.
The philosophy that attempts this is metaphysical in facing
a, problem that can be expressed in no terms of physical
science. It is ontological in seeking to appreciate the ulti-
mate meaning of whatever can be said to be.
It seems, then, that there is nothing within the possible
range of philosophy that need remain sealed for the thinker
who starts from the psychological base more than for any
other. In point of fact, the ' English ' thinkers, when in the
properly philosophic vein, have no more than others been
slow to declare how they conceive of things as, in the last
resort, being. They are only chargeable with having
allowed themselves to be led, by their method of approach-
ing philosophical questions, into an unsystematic and dis-
jointed treatment of them. The advantage to be obtained
by a clear distinction of Philosophy from Psychology would
tell in favour of both, but especially of Philosophy which thus
far has had its development most hampered in a conjunction
which has not seldom been a confusion. There is nothing to
hinder the thinker who works up to philosophy by way of
psychology from grappling with the general problem of
Knowledge, in as thorough a spirit of system as has marked
any of those, from Kant onwards, who have thought it the
-chief merit of their philosophy that it has been wrought out
•on a plane immeasurably higher or deeper than the level #t
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. '271
which psychologists creep along. There is nothing to
hinder, and his very psychology should rather urge him on
to the work of systematic interpretation, for which it sup-
plies the means as well as the motive. At least it is plain
that no psychological thinker need philosophise less syste-
matically than Kant, whose whole scheme of critical inquiry
has its stages psychologically determined.
.But, after all, the question is not whether psychologists
can become philosophers — as, of course, they can if they
will, or even whether psychologists are inevitably deter-
mined, as other scientific inquirers are not, to pass from
conclusions of science to the probing of human knowledge
to its foundations. The real question is whether the philo-
sopher in this (or other) part of his task is specially helped
by foregone psychological consideration ; and this has not yet
been directly met. The previous remarks, however, would
seem to warrant an affirmative answer. If it can be shown
(as here it has been suggested) that there is 110 problem of
philosophy which the psychologist does not have specially
forced on his attention at one or other stage of his science,
while his science gives him the means of considering it with
a definiteness of insight and in a methodical spirit which
interest in the deeper meaning and issues of things does
nothing of itself to guarantee, then it cannot be otherwise
than helpful to come to the work of philosophy from the
side of psychology. Though philosophical questions are not
to be solved under the same conditions of strict verification
as are possible in phenomenal science, philosophers as well
as scientific men desire to gain universal assent for the solu-
tions they propound. Philosophy, however differing from
science in its subject-matter, yet aims at the form of science.
It has been advanced most permanently, in all ages, by
those thinkers who were familiar with the best information
their time afforded in the way of special science. If, then,
it appears that there is one science which, while it is related
to the other sciences in method, has so far common subject
with philosophy that it is with Mind they are both (in what-
ever different way) concerned, the methodological advantage
of working into philosophy through the science of psychology
is hardly to be denied — even though the practical proof may-
27'2 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
yet remain to be given by psychologists that they can be as
thorough and comprehensive as they have hitherto been
sober and cautious in their philosophic thinking.
Meanwhile it may be observed how psychological science,
working within its own limits, has obtained results whose
philosophical import is in surprising agreement with con-
clusions which it is thought the greatest triumph of a very
different method to have been able to establish. Any regret,
indeed, that may be felt at the isolation in which English
thinkers have held themselves from the Kantian movement
in philosophy — being content to work on from their psy-
chological base as if it had never been questioned — is
tempered when it is seen what independent progress they
have been able to make upon their own line towards a
common goal. That is no argument for maintaining the
isolation, but may be held to prove that the method of
psychological approach is not philosophically valueless, and
gives ground for the belief that it has only to be more
systematically followed out for the achievement of as great
results as have ever been claimed for another way, while in
this way the results are more likely to secure general ac-
ceptance. Let us, in concluding these remarks for the
present, note but two points in the philosophical theory of
knowledge which, since the time of Kant, may be regarded
as placed beyond reasonable question : (1) that we know
Space, abstractly, as a ' form ' inclusive of sensation and,
actually, as one great continuum (percept, not concept) within
which all sensible objects are ordered ; (2) that anything to
be definitely called Object, as a sensible reality for all men
alike, is a complex product of thought-activity working
under common conditions in all. Now nothing is more
remarkable than the different accounts which the earlier
and the later English psychologists give of the perception^
of space and of 'external objects'. Compare with Locke's
crude notion of space, as a direct and simple datum of touch
or .sight, the present psychological theory that we acquire
perceptive consciousness of it by active synthesis, through
muscular organs, of elements of (passive) sensation ; or,
again, compare with even Hume's insight (so greatly
marked beyond anything in Locke or Berkeley) into the
PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. 278
processes of intellectual elaboration involved in objective
perception, the grasp that psychologists now have of the
representative factors that more than any presentative
elements explain how the percept appears as it does. I do
not say, here more than before, that the psychological are
the philosophical questions, but I say that there is no
aspect of the philosophical questions which may not be
better understood and more definitely treated because of
the psychological insight that has been gained. There is
nothing in Kant's philosophical analysis of either fact of
cognition — nothing, that is to say, which from the point of
view he places himself at may be unquestionably maintained
— for which a positive psychological warrant cannot now be
assigned ; while it is psychology that gives the clearest
demonstration of the limits that should be placed upon his
assertions (especially as to the universality of the space-
form as regards 'external' sense). If that be so, Psycho-
logy is amply avenged upon him for his despite.
18
LEIBNIZ AND HOBBES.1
THE recent discovery in the University Library at Halle of
a large number of letters from the unwearied hand of Leibniz
— surely the most epistolary of all great thinkers — does not
thus far prove to have much philosophical importance.- Dr.
L. Stein, editor of the new Archiv filr Gesch. der Phil., has in
the first two numbers of that review given a careful account
of all the autographic letters found, to the number of 101 ;
and the utmost that can be said of them is that they help to
deepen, if that were necessary, the impression of Leibniz as
a man to whose breadth and variety of intellectual interests
there was no bound, but who yet could pursue with the
utmost tenacity special scientific objects of his own, — as here
the perfecting of his reckoning-machine, entrusted, from about
1700 (long after its first invention), to a Helmstadt mathe-
matical professor, R. C. Wagner, his chief correspondent in
the collection. There is promise, indeed, that in the next
number of the Archiv some other of the Halle letters — but
these only copies, though not before published — will be made
to yield matter of philosophical interest, as touching the
question of the scope and value of history of philosophy.
Meanwhile it may be noted that the discovery at Halle is
not the only addition that has just been made to our knowledge
of Leibniz's amazing activity as a letter- writer. There has
recently appeared vol. iii. of the division given to ' Corre-
spondence ' in the stately collection of Die philosophischen
Schriftcn von G. W. Leibniz (Berlin, Weidmann), made since
1875 by C. J. Gerhardt, editor before of L.'s Matheinatische
Schriften. This volume was kept back while vols. iv.-vi. of
' Works ' were being issued from 1880. Apparently, though
the editor says nothing, some kind of supplement must still
be in view, outside of the original scheme ; various things
remaining unaccounted for within either division, as, for
1 Mind, xiii. 312.
LEIBNIZ AND HOBBES. 275
Example, the well-known correspondence with Samuel Clarke.
With all his merits and his unique claims to the gratitude of
Leibniz-students, Gerhardt, it must be said, has not in all
respects chosen the happiest way of presenting the fruits of
his research ; in particular, he might have been more forward
with the reasons for some of his action in the past, and now
he might have been less silent as to his actual intentions.
There can, however, be no question as to the philosophical
interest and value of the new, and hardly less of the corrected,
matter which, in all his volumes (of ' Works ' as well as
' Correspondence '), he has, with extraordinary labour, been
able to bring forth from the recesses of the Eoyal Library at
Hanover. In his latest volume — to go no farther back — at
least one important interchange of letters (with Jacquelot,
pp. 442-82) is made known for the first time ; while other
correspondences, more or less imperfectly printed before
(some in merest fragment), are now set out with all desirable
fulness and care. Among these are three : (1) with Thomas
Burnett of Kemnay, a Scottish friend of Locke's ; (2) with
Cudworth's daughter, Lady Masham, the comforter of Locke's
declining years ; (3) with Pierre Coste, the French translator
(in England) of Locke's Essay, — which throw so much new
light on the relations of the German to the English philo-
sopher that another occasion may be sought for giving some
detailed account of them in these pages. At present there is
something to tell, from another source, of the relation in
which Leibniz stood to an earlier English thinker — a relation
that had not before been half carefully enough studied, and
which, indeed, has been wholly overlooked by most expositors
of Leibniz, including Mr. Theodore Merz, who, in his excellent
contribution to " Blackwood's Philosophical Classics " (see
Mind, ix. 439), first set the great German fairly before English
readers.
It is that earnest student of Hobbes, Dr. Ferdinand
Tonnies, who, in a recent article in the Philosophische
Monatshcfte (xxiii. 557-73), has placed in a light as striking
as it is new the intellectual debt of Le bniz to Hobbes.
Leibniz, it may be well to remind the reader, was contem-
porary with Hobbes in the last third (1(546-79) of the
nonagenarian's life. It has long been known that the ardent
276 LEIBNIZ AND HOBBES.
young thinker, impressed at an early age by Hobbes among
other of the new ' mechanical ' philosophers, sought to enter
into closer relations with him by a complimentary and
interrogatory letter, written from Mainz in the year 1670.
The letter was first printed, from a copy of it taken by
Oldenburg through whom it was sent to Hobbes, in Guhrauer's
biography of Leibniz, whence it passed without change into
Gerhardt's vol. i. pp. 82-5 (having, by the way, its gist some-
what too loosely represented at p. 48). Now Dr. Tonnies has
had the good fortune to find, in the same volume (4294) of
SI. MSS. in the British Museum with Oldenburg's copy
(nearly correct in itself, but not always carefully followed by
Guhrauer), a document that has all the appearance of being
Leibniz's original letter. Of this he gives the first quite
accurate transcript, appending to it a series of remarkably
instructive " elucidations ".
For the understanding of the development of Leibniz's
thought — a subject of peculiar interest and difficulty — Dr.
Tonnies's few pages make more really effective use than has
yet been made of the rich material now rendered accessible
by Gerhardt's diligence. It has recently been used, not
without effect, by Dr. David Selver for two elaborate articles
in the Philosophische Studien (iii. 217-63, 420-51, "Der
Entwickelungsgang der Liebniz'schen Monadenlehre bis
1695 ") ; but this careful writer, who ranges also over a
wider field to good purpose, has overlooked, like others before
him, the facts now discerned, with characteristic penetration,
by Dr. Tonnies. When read in connexion with the various
utterances in letters or other writings from 1663 which Dr.
Tonnies has been the first to marshal, the letter of 1670
leaves it hardly doubtful that, up to this date at least, Leibniz
was more deeply affected by Hobbes than by any other of
the leading spirits of the new time. If as late as 1669 he
could, in a letter to J. Thomasius, express a preference for
the doctrine of Aristotle's Physica over that of Descartes'
Meditationes, he cannot have been very familiar with this
treatise, so purely philosophical in character as it is, and it
may well be doubted, with Dr. Tonnies, whether he can by
that time have read at all Descartes' chief work, the Principia
Philosophies, which does contain a physical, as well as meta-
LEIBNIZ AND HOBBES. 277
physical, doctrine. To be sure, the letter of 1670 itself
includes a very high-flown reference to the French philoso-
pher, but there is every reason, notwithstanding, to believe
that Leibniz's serious occupation with Descartes' philosophy
followed upon the years from 1672 in which he gave himself
with such ardour and brilliant success to the study of mathe-
matics ; as, probably, it then was from the sense of having
so swiftly surpassed Descartes in mathematical discovery that
he always continued more eager to accentuate their differences
than their agreements in philosophy. On the other hand,
we find him, by the year 1670, riot only conversant with
Hobbes's thought at all its stages, whether of principle or
application, but evidently concerned to get some accommo-
dation of it to those practical interests of religion which were
uppermost with him all through life. The time was near
when he could not retain the faith he may have had even in
the mathematical pretensions of the De Corpore, but, as Dr.
Tonnies shows, other ideas, logical, metaphysical and even
physical, plainly to be traced to that work, remained always
operant with him. The most signal, undoubtedly, is that
reference by Hobbes, in De Corpore (c. 25, § 5), to the
possibility of regarding all bodies whatever as endued with
sense in so far forth as reactive, though he himself proceeds
to urge that it should be limited to living creatures, which do
not simply react but have special organs for the retaining
of impressed motion or — as he interprets this — have memory.
Leibniz clearly has the passage in view when, in the letter of
1670, he goes so far beyond Hobbes (in the direction of
Descartes) as to doubt whether sense can be more properly
ascribed to brutes than "pain to boiling water". But
already in the following year, as Dr. Tonnies points out, he
is found harking back, in the tract Theoria Motus Abstracti,
to a position which is essentially the same as Hobbes's, though
he gives it an affirmative expression, peculiar to himself,
which is of the utmost significance in view of the Monadism
of later years. Two sentences may here be quoted : " Nullus
conatus sine motu durat ultra momentum, praeterquam in
mentibus. . . . Omne enim corpus est mens momentanea,
sed carens recordatione." It did not escape Leibniz's con-
temporaries whence he had got his inspiration ; for Dr.
'278 LEIBNIZ AND HOBBES.
Tonnies is able to cite the words of mournful reproach with
which a forgotten G. Kaphson, in controversy with Leibniz
on the point, brings forward the very passage from Hobbes.
Dr. Tonnies himself, in view of it, and in view of the further
development of Leibniz's thought that may now be referred
definitely to 1678 (since publication by Gerhardt of his
marginal notes written on Spinoza's Ethica in that year),
does not hesitate to describe his metaphysical doctrine as,
in strictness, " a Hobbism that had taken up Spinozism into
it," or, again, to say: for Leibniz "Hobbism is the true
physics; Spinozism, the true psychology". However this
may be, — and certainly account has to be taken of a number
of still later stages of development, at least in expression,
before Leibniz, close upon the end of the century, had final
possession of his doctrine, — enough should have been said to
show that Dr. Tonnies has done a real service in drawing
attention to an aspect of it that in recent times has not been
at all regarded.
The letter to Hobbes (then eighty-two) remained un-
answered for all its compliments, which should not have been
ungrateful to the old man amid so much hostile clamour as
attended his closing years. Dr. Tonnies is doubtless right in
ascribing to disappointment the petulant terms in which Leib-
niz, writing to Thomasius some months later in the same year,
speaks, on Oldenburg's authority, of Hobbes as passing into
second childhood. It must have been a transient shade of feel-
ing, for some time later — apparently in 1672, from Paris — he
began to address another letter of appreciative criticism to
the aged thinker (given by Guhrauer and Gerhardt from the
unfinished draft at Hanover). There is no evidence of their
having met when Leibniz came over for some weeks to
London, early in 1673 ; most probably, Hobbes was then
in Derbyshire.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION.1
THE effort so often renewed since the days of Herbart to
construct a psychological theory of Extension has so far had
results that appear to be hardly more satisfactory to those
who may be supposed to maintain than to those who dis-
count the enterprise in principle. Some recent treatment of
the subject by writers whose scientific earnestness is "above
question makes it worth while inquiring what may be the
reason of the discontent or disagreement in regard to it so
patent among psychologists. For this purpose I will here
assume, without argument against those of the other way
of thinking, that there is nothing in our perception of Ex-
tension to set it beyond psychological analysis. It is one
thing, indeed, to seek to determine (psychologically) how
we come by the perception, and quite another to determine
(philosophically) what import is to be ascribed to the ex-
tension of body or to the space it appears to fill ; but, this
borne in mind, there is surely no more legitimate, or even
imperative, task than to attempt to explain how body comes
to appear as spread out in what we call space. Now why
has this question failed to get a solution commanding some-
thing like general assent ? I would suggest that it is chiefly
because of the way in which it is too often taken up. It
should be taken up, as I will try briefly to show, after and
not before, or at least in definite and express relation to, a
certain other question. The point has not been overlooked
by some — for example, Prof. Bain and still earlier writers
—but it has not been urged with all the persistence or con-
sistency that the case seems to require ; nor has it yet (that
I know of) been urged at all in relation to the later manner
of stating the problem that has come into vogue under
German influence.
1 Mind, xiii. 418.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION.
Among recent work on the space-question from the
psychological point of view, I refer, of course, chiefly to
Mr. Ward's now celebrated article in vol. xx. of the Encydo-
pcedia Britannica, and to the remarkable series of dissertations
by Prof. James that ran through last year's Mind (1887).
The work of these two writers may first be noted for the
confession it seems to involve of something very like psycho-
logical impotence.1 They have been, independently, driven
to make assumption of an inherent character in sensation
that brings them perilously near, if it does not quite carry
them over, to the position of those who contend that a
psychological theory must always include among the ele-
ments of the explanation, though it may be under some
disguise or other, the very fact of extension to be explained.
With Prof. James, indeed, there is no disguise and it is
difficult to see in what respect he does not go over. All the
pity that his historical epilogue showers upon Kantians
that know themselves and (more liberally still) upon Kan-
tians that know themselves not, does not alter the essential
import of his own round declaration of a primitive experience
of "bigness or extensiveness " in all sensation. Within
their general assumption as to the nature of space, the
followers of Kant have found it no less possible or necessary
than Prof. James to inquire what are the precise factors of
sense and intellect entering into our various perceptions of
extension ; and for the start it really matters very little, in
the psychological point of view, whether space is called
' pure form ' with (external) sensation for ' matter,' 'or
whether we are told, as by Prof. James, that "extensiveness''
1 Compare Mr. F. H. Bradley's incidental remark in Mind, xii. 869 n. :
" All the attempts which I have seen made to derive extension from
what is quite non-extended in my opinion break down ". Mr. Ward had
expressed himself to similar effect thus (E. B., xx. 53 b) : " The most
elaborate attempt to get extensity [ ? extension] out of succession and
coexistence is that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. He has done perhaps all
that can be done, and only to make it the more plain that the entire
procedure is a vtrrtpov Trporepov." Whether Mr. Ward's own derivation
of extension from or with help of ' extensity ' is more satisfactory to Mr.
Bradley does not appear. At all events, it is not covered by his remark ;
for the extensity claimed (as well as intensity) for sensation cannot be
understood as " quite non-extended," if it is to do the work of explana-
tion which, without it, Mr. Ward considers so hopeless. As to vvrtpttv
irpdrtpov, on one or other side in the case, something is to be said above.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION. '2H1
is an empirical aspect of sensation, justifying the use of such
terms as " sense-space," " spatial feeling," and even " sensa-
tion of line or angle " ! This novel kind of psychological
speech, if fit to raise the hair of other people besides Kan-
tians, does yet not keep himself from saying, with any
Kantian of them all, " that, within the range of every sense,
experience takes ab iuitio the spatial form " (p. 30).
" Ab initio ! " — there lies, in regard to the fact of " spatial
form," the question for the psychologist as it has come to
the front in this century, not least by reason of Kant's
(philosophical) analysis carried so much deeper than any-
thing attempted before. Let it, however, be observed in
passing that, even for the psychologist, the question is not
so much of beginning of the individual's mental life — in
respect of which the truth may lie one way or the other
according as the evidence, if only it could be forthcoming
in any decisive shape, may determine — as of beginning of
scientific consideration.1 Is the spatial form, in which at
least some (we need not now ask whether all) sensations are
experienced, so inextricably present with them from the
first and always, that it cannot be viewed apart and reason-
ably shown to have a derivation from certain mental data
presumably simpler? Now the allowance may at once be
made that data of the kind usually assigned, at least in the
way they are assigned or usually employed, fail to afford a
satisfactory explanation. The data are ' muscular sensa-
tions,' in relation always with elements of (passive) touch
and sight, and certain laws of intellectual grouping under
which the sense-elements are supposed to be worked up.
When the data of the so-called muscular sense are repre-
sented as ' feelings of movement,' the work of explanation
is not, indeed, found difficult ; but then, as has rightly been
objected, the whole question is begged, since ' movement '
plainly presupposes 'space'. If ' muscular sense ' is under-
lfThis is said not without reference to the argument conducted by
Dr. E. Montgomery in his important series of articles on " Space and
Touch " in Mind, vol. x. Dr. Montgomery's earlier contention, in the
work on Kant with which he first came before the philosophical world
(Die Kantische Erkenntnisslehre widerleyt vom Standpunkte der Empiric,
Miinchen, 1871), seems to me to have lost nothing of its essential
psychological value.
'282 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION.
stood in its purity as ' sense of effort,' we have, by the side
of tactile and ocular sensation, merely another, though it
may be a quite peculiar kind of intensive element ; and the
difficulty is then serious enough, how a variety of intensive
elements can come, by any means of grouping, to assume
in consciousness the appearance of an extended order.
Through repetition, reversal, &c., elements apprehended at
first in succession may very well end by appearing as co-
existent, but it is still a far cry from coexistence-in-time to
coexistence-also-in-space, which is the meaning of extension.
How is the transformation to be effected ? Or, rather, can
it any way be effected ? I do not know that it can, if sought
for upon that line. But perhaps there may be no such diffi-
culty, if it should appear that the problem of Extension is
one not to be thus directly faced.
Doubtless, Extension is the fundamental aspect of the
objective world as it offers itself to our apprehension. In
our everyday view of things, which psychology has to render
account of, space has the same appearance of external reality
as the body that fills it ; and extension is the one attribute
that is common alike to bod}7 and to space. It must be a
consideration of this kind that induces even Prof. Bain, with
whom extension later on takes a secondary place, to begin
his whole psychological doctrine with a distinction of
"object "and " subject " as the Extended and Unextended
— a distinction which Descartes and others are there to
support with the metaphysical assertion that extension is
the one essential attribute of whatever is other than mind.
However it be with the metaphysical fact, which does not
now concern us, certainly we must grant to the full the
universality of the problem of Extension as it offers itself to
the psychologist in regard to the world of sensible experience.
It does not, therefore, follow that the problem is the first to
be attacked in working out a theory of objective perception.
Extension is the fundamental aspect of sensible object only
in a logical point of view. There is every reason for assert-
ing that it is not the historical prius in our actual apprehen-
sion of object. Will any one, upon reflexion, maintain that
a child becomes aware of Space, which is extended and only
extended, before it is aware of Body, which is resisting as
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION. 283
well as extended ? It cannot seriously be doubted that we
arrive at our perception of space by a literal evacuation of,
and thus after, the fuller and more impressive perception of
body. Now, if this be so, we surely have here the right clue
to the order in which psychological explanation should be
attempted.
The difficulty of the problem in the form now commonly
given to it lies, we have seen, in getting elements of ex-
perience, all in the first instance describable as ' intensive '
only, to acquire the ' extensive ' character. Intensive ex-
periences continue always to be referred to the subjective
mental stream flowing on in time. On the other hand,
experiences of the extended order — without ceasing to be
interpretable as experiences (else they would not concern the
psychologist) — have the appearance of being detached from
the mental stream; and- are then called 'objective'. Now
so long as no suggestion of a reason is afforded why they
should thus become detached, the difficulty remains un-
solved. Within the mental stream intensive elements may,
in the way before mentioned, become aggregated into what
appear clusters of concurring events, but upon that line
nothing more seems possible. Let them, however, in the
form of such time-clusters, be experienced in connexion
with something that is already construed as external
object, and at once they may begin to take on a new char-
acter by reference to this. I have said ' external object \
for the sake of definiteiiess, not because I am not well aware
that the word '.external ' — understood with reference to the
bodily organism of the perceiver or in any other way — may
be said, here again, to beg the whole question at issue.
Upon the ' externality,' as such, no stress can rightly be laid
at the outset. It is ' object ' (in whatever vague or shadowy
sense of a not-self) from which the start has to be made ;
and ' object ' — as indeed the name implies — is just ' obstacle,'
without at first implying anything more. All psychologists
may be said now to be agreed upon this, that it is in the
phase of resisted muscular activity that we first become
conscious of a 'not-self as opposed to 'self: not that we
all at once achieve the distinction, but that we gradually
attain it through experience of this kind. Analyse the
'284 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION.
experience, and again the elements are found to be merely
intensive — intensity of (passive) touch varying with intensity
of effort ; yet here it is not to be denied that the touch is
related to the effort in such a way as inevitably to suggest
a cleft in conscious experience, which has but to be widened
and denned for the opposition of self and not-self to become
established. Now the point to be urged is that if only
object, as bare obstacle to muscular activity of a touching
organ, has already to any degree become differentiated in
consciousness, a basis is got by reference to which the
conjoined sensible experiences shown by analysis to be
involved in any perception of extension may begin to appear
— not as the simply intensive experiences, of one kind or
other, which they are in themselves, but — as constituents of
object (as not-self). In point of fact, the development of
the two aspects of external (bodily) object — resistance and
extension — will proceed pari passu as soon as a beginning of
both has been made ; or, to put the case otherwise, body
will not come to be perceived as definitely external till it is
also perceived as definitely extended (in relation to an
extended organism of the perceiver). But the first begin-
ning must take place somehow ; and this, upon the view here
contended for, is to be sought in that aspect of object (as
body) which we call Resistance, rather than in that aspect
of object (either body or space) which we call Extension.
Apartness — which is another way of saying Extension —
needs, in short, for its apprehension that something be
supposed already there in which the particular kind of this-
and-that meant in the word ' apart ' may be manifested.
The mistake of the space-theorists, generally, is to seek for
an extension that is extension of nothing at all. No wonder,
then, that those of them who take their task most seriously,
finding the means proposed insufficient but not exactly
considering why, are tempted into transforming these by
assumptions that practically supersede the psychological
question altogether. Let, however, the 'something,' in
whatever vague sense of an experience of resisting object, be
first got — as got it can be on psychological ground — and
there is no longer the same difficulty of construing as
extension other (more complex and varied) experiences that
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION. 285
are had in connexion with the first. A base is wanted for
the psychological operation. A psychological base is not
wanting.
The reader has now but to look at the theory of Perception
elaborated with so much care by Mr. Ward in his Psycho-
logy to see how completely is there reversed the order of
explanation here maintained to be the natural and effective
one. Like others who have followed the German lead in
this matter, but with an independence and a thoroughness
of treatment all his own, Mr. Ward first works out a space-
theory in the vague, and only afterwards, under the head of
" intuition of things," comes across the kind of considera-
tions here regarded as fundamental in any psychological
doctrine of perception. See, especially, what he says upon
the second and the fifth of the "points" which, in the
following order, he distinguishes in the complex presentation
of an orange or piece of wax — (1) reality (actuality), (2)
solidity or occupation of space (impenetrability), (3) con-
tinuity in time, (4) unity and complexity, (5) substantiality.
Now, certainly, the intuition of " thing " is the culminating
fact of perception — so much so, indeed, that there enters,
I venture to think, a good deal more into the psychological
account of its "substantiality," at least, than Mr. Ward, for
all his care in distinguishing those various moments, appears
to recognise — but the psychologist is not therefore justified
in keeping back till the later stage all reference to the
simplest, the earliest and the most impressive of all our
sense-experiences in the case. We do not first " attain a
knowledge of space" by " movements of exploration," and
then, " when these movements are definitely resisted or are
only possible by increased effort," "reach the full meaning
of body as that which occupies space" (p. 56 a). Rather, as
I have sought to argue, we first, through simple and direct
effort put forth, get some kind of vague notion of body as
resisting, and then by more complex efforts that are found
to procure tactile impressions (continuous or discrete, as the
case may be) — efforts not interpretable as movements till
they have done their part in the work of psychological
construction — we distinguish this and that extensively with-
in such body, and the body as a whole in relation to our own
286 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF EXTENSION.
bodily frame ; later still, distinguishing from such extended
body the (empty) space which it fills.
In Prof. James's elaborate theory of space-perception, the
salient feature is not so much the direct consideration of
extension by itself — though it is so considered — as the pro-
minence given to questions of visual space, which it is his
purpose to solve in terms of purely ocular experience. Upon
this, it is not out of relation to the foregoing remarks to end
with a certain note of interrogation. The service, indeed,
should first be acknowledged which Prof. James has ren-
dered to English psychology in forcing attention to ques-
tions which it has been too much the insular habit, since
the days of Berkeley, to slur over with a merely general
profession of Berkeleyan theory. There the facts of visual
perception are, in all their variety and perplexity, as they
have been made out by the patient labour of so many
continental investigators. It is no small gain to have them
now brought so definitely into English view, nor less to
have them at the same time explained, with triumphant
confidence, in the sense most shocking to English prejudice.
But the query may not be suppressed : What is, then, with
Prof. James and the physiological allies to whom he lends
psychological authority, the meaning of visual perception?
When, straightway at the beginning, he puts skin and retina
without ado on one perceptive level, and applauds Hering's
declaration that he, for his part, has ocular sensations not
only of the surface-order but " roomy " altogether, one
wonders if the thought has occurred to either how ocular
sensations are had at all. It is not, of course, with eye only
that we are visually conscious, nor again with anything that
can be called ' visual centre,' more or less circumscribed as
this may finally prove to be, in the brain ; but (keeping, as
for the present purpose we may, to physical terms) it is with
the brain altogether — a brain that has never been known to
develop the functional activity of perception without skin-
impressions. People have lived and died without the use of
eyes, but nobody has ever grown up with an insensitive skin.
How can Hering, then, or Prof. James, with a perceptive
consciousness of touches all-compact, say what the eye
alone shall in the way of space-perception be able to accom-
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEOEY OF EXTENSION. 287
plish ? How show that " roominess " — or, for that matter,
surface either — which their eyes may readily be credited with
beholding and in fact cannot help seeing, is an affair of mere
ocular consciousness ? Nor, in asking such questions, is it
at all implied that the eye does not give, or rather procure,
us everything that is highest and most commanding in our
space-perception. It is not even implied that, if we could
suppose ourselves reduced to the eye with its exploratory
movements as our sole and only means of constructing a
spatial order, such a construction might not come to pass —
however far removed it would be in character from that of
our actual experience. All that is meant is that, dependent
as we are for all our basal experiences upon locomotive
organs that are at the same time tactile, it is impossible for
us through the eye to have a perception of space that is not
ultimately, whatever its refinements of discrimination and
consequent development of range, to be referred to the
tactile base. This is the position that Berkeley took up,
and it remains inexpugnable, let the particular ocular
conditions be what they may that have further to be taken
into account before our visual experience in all its detail is
satisfactorily explained. But in the position, rightly under-
stood, it appears to be no less involved, as I have here
sought to maintain, that the construction of tactile space
needs again for its base a prior construction — no matter
how inchoate — of tangible object.
DB. H. MUNSTEKBERG ON APPERCEPTION.1
Is the psychological function to which Prof. Wundt would
appropriate the hitherto unsettled name of Apperception radi-
cally distinct from Association ? This is the question to which
Dr. H. Miinsterberg more particularly addresses himself in the
first part of that remarkable series of Contributions to Experi-
mental Psychology which (as noted in Mind, Nos. 56, 57) he has
begun to publish.2 The question is not at all new, being in
fact as old as psychology itself ; but it has acquired a new
prominence of late, in this country as well as in Germany.
It has been urged upon us here, in the home of Associa-
tionism, that without positing a function of attention, sub-
jective activity, activity of consciousness, will (or what not
else, so long as the essential import be activity), there can be
no scientific understanding of mind, — any more than it has
been found possible in common life to speak of mental experi-
ence without words of active meaning. The special interest
attached to Wundt's similar declaration in Germany arises
from the experimental grounds on which he seeks to base
it, or — what comes practically to the same thing — from the
psychophysical attitude which he desires always to maintain
in psychological inquiry. For, if Wundt asserts an apper-
ceptive activity beyond mere associative process, it is not
that he does not labour to interpret the one as well as .the
other in physiological terms. In spite of various expressions
which have led others (like Prof. Bain in Mind, xii. 174) be-
sides Miinsterberg to doubt whether he thinks it of universal
application, it is not really to be supposed that the prime
1 Mind, xv. 284.
3 Bfitrage zur experimentellen Psychologie. Von HUGO MTJNSTEBBERG,
Dr. phil et med., Privatdocent der Philosophie an der Universitat Frei-
burg. Heft 1. Freib. i. B. : J. 0. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1889. Pp.
xii., 188.
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 289
champion of the psychophysical method in- this generation is
not as much concerned as any of his critics to obtain by
means of it the necessary basis for strict experimental in-
vestigation over the whole mental field. Now when asser-
tions are based on experiment there is the signal advantage
that by experiment they can be decisively tested. This,
then, is the task which, in regard to Wundt's doctrine, by
preference over any other assertion of an efficient activity of
consciousness, Miinsterberg has undertaken in the first of his
published researches, bearing the special title of " Voluntary
and Involuntary Combination of Ideas ".
This memoir, like others that have so far followed it in
the series, has the noteworthy feature of not putting
forward any elaborate tabulation of numerical results,
but of presenting these in the most highly condensed form
consistent with intelligibility and serviceableness for infer-
ence. A deft and untiring experimenter, it is yet about the
reasoned interpretation of his results that Miinsterberg is
chiefly concerned. Not only, therefore, does he include with
all his researches (in their published form) a careful review
of previous work done on the subject of each, and develop at
length the conclusions to be drawn from his own experi-
ments, but he places in the front of his Beitrage an argument-
ative statement of the aim and method of his whole inquiry.
To those who may have come to think that the proof of recent
advance in psychology is to be found in the new fashion of
severe numerical presentation, Munsterberg's wealth of argu-
ment, often polemical, may seem to indicate a falling-back
into earlier unscientific habit ; but, surely, it is not so. There
is not yet such universal agreement in matters of psycho-
logical principle that all that remains for the scientific in-
quirer is to sink himself in special questions and heap up
experimental values in bald tabular form. Questions of
general principle are still among those that most need con-
sentaneous determination ; and if this is to come, as it can
now only come, by way of rigid experiment, no prior or
sequent discussion that helps to make the experimental test
more precise and telling is anything but in place. Apart
from a certain disposition to range somewhat widely in
argument and perhaps some superfluous repetition, — which
19
290 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
it would be well to repress and avoid as far as possible in the
interest of an enterprise that has to make its way with readers
but is now (after its third part) clearly not going to fail
through shortcoming of its author, — it may fairly be said of
Miinsterberg's experimental work that it has peculiar value
just from being so pointedly prepared by general considera-
tion and driven so completely home.
Coming now to the direct aim and purport of his carefully
planned scheme of research, it certainly cannot be charged
against Miinsterberg, however it be with others, that he
does not constantly bear in mind the necessity of making no
psychological assertion that has not its definite physiological
counterpart. While his investigations are declared to be
psychological — that is to say, neither physiological on the
one hand nor metaphysical (philosophical) on the other —
they are yet psychological in a sense that keeps the physio-
logical reference ever in view. Not that he denies the pos-
sibility or legitimacy of a purely subjective psychology, work-
ing with its own appropriate conceptions and hypotheses.
This he does as little as he fails to see, from the philosophical
point of view, that physiological facts, like all other facts of
objective science, can have ultimate expression only in terms
of conscious (which is properly subjective) experience. But
within the range of phenomenal science, where facts of nerve-
physiology stand in obvious relation with facts of subjective
psychology, he is most of all impressed by the circumstance
that the one class — objective as they are— lend themselves to
a definiteness and a continuity of representation unattainable
with the other. It is, then, psychophysical consideration
which he aims at carrying consistently through, in the
interest of a scientific understanding of mind. And the
prime question, of course, is how the facts of (subjective)
consciousness are to be conceived, for this to become pos-
sible.
To this question he replies with all due explicitness in
his introductory sections (pp. 1-63) on " Consciousness and
Brain " : not for the first time, indeed, for he had already
faced the question in a previous critical essay (Die Willens-
handlung, see Mind, xiii. 436), where lie sought to work
out a psychophysical theory of Will in all its manifestations,
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 291
low or high. The difficulty is where conscious experience
seems to be of a sort that can only be phrased (subjectively)
in terms of action. It is not always such ; for there is now
what may be called a general allowance, that muscular
reaction innervated from the brain under stimulus from
afferent nerve is an adequate physiological expression of the
simpler kind of psychological experience covered by the
name Sense. Such mental aggregates, too, as are plainly
of associative origin are hardly denied to be representable
by definite brain-configurations, — whatever difference of
opinion may remain as to the exact (subjective) analysis of
Association. The difficulty, no doubt, is already there, or
still earlier at the stage of Sense, in as far as either of these
kinds of experience may be held, after all, to import some
degree of conscious activity ; but it becomes most truly
marked where Volition for personal ends, or Thought as
subjective reaction upon the multiplicity of experience that
passively accrues, is in question. Here it is that Wundt
finds it necessary to oppose to anything that can be called
Association a function of Apperception, — which he leaves
in general with purely subjective expression, though at times
seeking to connect it in a more or less halting way with
process of the frontal brain-lobe. Miinsterberg, on the
other hand, makes it his express care to see whether the
phrasing in terms of activity of consciousness, which so ill
bears physiological translation, is as indispensable subjec-
tively as it is not denied to be subjectively admissible. By
way of analytic inquiry, directed especially upon that notion
of conscious Ego or subject to which is ascribed the power
of striking actively into the stream of mental occurrence, he
claims that not less admissible is another manner of psycho-
logical statement for which the corresponding physiological
expression is not so far to seek. The problem, in fact, as
he urges, is to interpret all that is called activity or change
of consciousness as change of conscious content. So inter-
preted, there need be no more difficulty (beyond greater
complexity of statement) in finding the physiological formula
of thought or volition than of bare memory or sense. But
to Miinsterberg it is at the same time clear that, in thus
transposing the psychological theme for consistency of
292 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
scientific understanding, the limit of possible explanation
should be well observed. The fact of consciousness itself,
with all that it directly implies, — for this, he holds, there is
no meaning in seeking a physiological expression. In other
words, it is the empirical Ego of psychology — not the pure
Ego of philosophical consideration — whose doings it is pos-
sible to interpret in terms of subjective "content," and thus
render translatable into the other language employed by
psychophysical science. There is the more need to note this
point which Miinsterberg so explicitly makes, because Wundt,
if prone to bring consciousness as an unknown quantity into
psychological explanation, has yet committed himself (like
others in these days) to the general position that conscious-
ness has its physical expression in terms of the collective
functioning of the brain (or nervous system). Between the
two investigators, it may seem a case where the adage holds
true that the half is more than the whole. Consciousness
with its fundamental activities of discrimination and assimi-
lation (or however they are expressed) may very well be
taken as simple assumption not needing or admitting of any
other kind of expression, — provided that none of the specific
questions of our mental life with which the psychologist has
to deal, remain withdrawn from the kind of scientiQc deter-
mination that has been found so effective with some.
For, now, the peculiar importance of Miinsterberg's work
lies in the kind of questions which he is able, from his point
of view, to subject to experimental treatment. The point of
view has often been taken before, if never, perhaps, with
such careful discernment of the issues involved: what no
one previously has done is to make so good a beginning of
turning it to scientific account in detail. The question being
this — whether there is anything in so-called apperceptive
activity that takes it outside the sphere of associative process
(assumed to be psychophysically intelligible), Miinsterberg
seeks to approach its determination by two different lines
of experiment. The first is directed to seeing whether, in
circumstances progressively more complex than in a certain
simple case of reaction where, according to Wundt, appercep-
tive activity of consciousness must already be supposed at
work, there is not evidence that all that goes forward is
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 298
unconsciously performed, in a manner that can only be
physically represented. The other is an attempt to bring
acts of judgment or choice (as all would call them) so into
relation with cases (as commonly described) of mere associa-
tion, that whatever psychophysical account may be given of
these must be held equally applicable to those.
I. The first inquiry makes use of a distinction established
experimentally by L. Lange, one of Wundt's pupils, and
interpreted by Wundt himself in accordance with his ap-
perceptive theory. The time of reaction to sensible impres-
sion is found to vary according as the reagent's attention
is directed to the impression to be received or to the move-
ment to be put forth. It is considerably longer in the former
case ; and this being interpreted to involve a specific act
of conscious apperception (of the impression) absent in the
other case — where the reaction is supposed to follow with
the directness (as it were) of a reflex movement — the ' sense-
reaction' is spoken of as ' complete,' the ' motor reaction' as
' shortened'. Now Miinsterberg bethought him of seeing
how the relation of the two kinds of reaction might turn out
in circumstances where the shortening could not be supposed
due to the effect of habit — rendering the act (secondarily)
automatic. For this he decided to work with the five
fingers of the right hand, and get a reagent (Dr. Thumb, as
it happened) to respond with movement of particular finger
to particular stimulus, and eventually to particular kinds of
stimulus that gave progressively more and more scope for
what might seem to be conscious discrimination and identi-
fication. The apparatus employed did not in principle differ
from that used in the simple reaction-time experiments of
Wundt's laboratory, and all this part of the case may here
be passed over with the remark that nothing in the way of
care or precaution seems wanting to the work. Sound
uttered by Miinsterberg himself was the stimulus chosen, and
the time was measured in thousandths of a second (<r)
between his utterance, synchronising with pressure of a
knob, and the reagent's movement of response, consisting in
the raising of particular finger from a keyboard on which
the five were at rest. The first point to ascertain was
whether all the fingers could be raised upon stimulus with
294 DB. H. MUNSTEBBEBG ON APPEBCEPTION.
equal readiness, and this, after some practice, was found to
be the case. Then the experiment went forward in a way
and to a result that may be summarily described as follows.
The reagent's time (1) with any finger being found, upon
average of many trials, to be 160cr, l'20o-, respectively, for
'complete' and 'shortened' reaction to uniform stimulus, he
was next tried with different stimulus for each finger.
Thus (2) the thumb was to be raised at sound one, and so on
to last finger at sound five ; here after due trial, of course in
pell-mell order of utterance, the figures became 383, 289.
Again, (3) the words appropriated to the different fingers in
order being lupus, lupi, lupo, lupum, lupe, the figures obtained
with this quite artificial association were 465, 355. So far,
the object was only to give practice in definiteness of re-
sponse, the possible effect of habit not being eliminated.
But now (4) there were at one and the same time allotted to
the fingers in order five cases of the three pronouns, ich,
nieiner, mir, mich, wir ; du, deiner, dir, dich, ihr ; der, des,
dem, den, die, and a particular finger had to be raised to any
one of three different sounds uttered irregularly from among
fifteen in all. Here, where there no longer could be ques-
tion of fixed association but there had to be constantly
renewed discrimination, the time for the two kinds of reac-
tion rose to 688, 430. And from this point emerged, under
progressively more difficult conditions, a very remarkable
result. The thumb, forefinger, &c., were to be raised
respectively upon random utterance, (5) of any noun, adjec-
tive, pronoun, number, verb ; (6) of the name of any city, river,
animal, plant, (chemical) element; (7) of the name of any
poet, musician, naturalist, philosopher, statesman (or general").
Here, in accordance with the increasing difficulty of identi-
fication, the time for 'complete' reaction rose from the 688
of the previous case to 712, 893, 1122 ; but the time of
' shortened ' reaction remained practically constant, being
432, 432, 437 by the side of the 430 of case (4). There was
also the notable circumstance that only from case (4) onwards
did errors — of raising the wrong finger (generally as between
fourth and fifth) — occur, and this always in connexion with
the 'shortened,' never with the 'complete,' reaction. The
errors in the different cases were respectively 10, 30, 12, 25
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 295
per ct. ; where the excess in case (5) admits of sufficient
explanation from the difficulty of finding words (always of
one syllable) that, as sounded, might not be referred to more
than one head, e.g., the pronoun sie being in utterance
indistinguishable from the imperative sieh.
These figures, which are startling enough, have an obvious
bearing on the question whether the exercise of appercep-
tive function (however this may or may not be physically
conditioned) makes the whole difference that has been alleged
between the two kinds of reaction ; also upon the question
whether work of the consciously active (or actively conscious)
sort is as necessary as has been supposed for the attainment
of certain intellectual results. If, without first consciously
attending to a particular sound (i.e., discriminating and
identifying it), and without then consciously deciding to
put forth one particular movement rather than any of several
others in response to it, the movement is, in general, found
to be rightly put forth apart from such consciousness, pro-
vided only the system (call it mental or nervous) is by pre-
arrangement poised in more or less determinate fashion, —
why, then, the part commonly reserved for direct activity
of consciousness must, surely, be allowed to be one that is
by no means indispensable. But, before remarking further
upon the interpretation which Mlinsterberg would put upon
the results of his first series of experiments, let us in like
manner have summary view of what he attains with his
second.
II. The second research has a relation to previous experi-
ments on Association-time, especially those carried out at
Leipsic with so much care by Prof. Cattell (see Mind, vol.
xi. passim), but is guided by a different principle, and seeks
to bring experiment directly to bear upon mental processes
of the higher or more recondite sort. Hitherto it is in-
directly, by way of calculation, bare reaction-time first dis-
counted, that it has been sought to get a ' recognition-time,'
a ' will-time,' and with these also an ' association-time '. For
Miinsterberg, on the other hand, the main question just is,
whether the mental processes here distinguished do in any
case so join on in serial order, the one ending before another
begins, as to be thus separable by calculation. And he
4296 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
would solve it by working up experimentally from relatively
simple cases of intellection to others which plainly involve
judgment and will. The method of experiment was to re-
quire of two reagents, M. and B. (Drs. Mayer and Bieger),
to utter alternately, ten at a time, single words in response
to questions of different degrees of complexity conveyed to
them by Miinsterberg's utterance, in such way as that the
time could be accurately measured between question and
response, — by having the two utterances combined with
simultaneous finger-movements that respectively closed and
opened the galvanic current of the registering apparatus.
In the graduated series of questions put to the reagents,
the earlier ones involved nothing more than request for
an associated name ; but, as Miinsterberg urges, this cannot
be sought for under experimental conditions without imply-
ing some kind of judgment in the response, since even in
the case of freest association it must really be an associate
of one kind or other, and not any name whatever. Thus
it is possible, for purposes of comparison, to bring what are
called involuntary associations effectually into line with such
judgments as obviously import choice and volition.
Beginning was made (1) with simple repetition of the call-
word, yielding a mean time for M. of 403cr, for B. of 362cr.
(' Mean variation ' is added throughout, in proof of the care
taken in averaging the thirty or forty trials made with each
reagent at every stage of the experiment, but may here be
left aside.) After this preliminary, the experiment went
forward in a way that may perhaps be more clearly conveyed
by giving at each stage some examples of the type of ques-
tions put and answered, rather than by any general designa-
tion of the different types :—
(2) Associate of ' Gold ' ? — ' Silver.' ' Strength ' ? — ' Force.'
4 Sing ' ?—' Dance.' M. 845, B. 948.
(3) 'Greek poet?' — 'Homer.' 'Drama of Goethe'?' —
< Goetz.' ' Prussian town ? '— ' Berlin.' M. 970, B. 1103.
(4) ' Three times four?' — 'Twelve.' 'In what season of
the year, June?' — 'Summer.' 'Teacher of Plato ?'-
' Socrates.' M. 808, B. 889.
(5) ' Which more important, Virgil or Ovid ? ' — ' Virgil.'
' Which do you like better, wine or beer ? ' — ' Beer.' ' Which
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 297
seems harder to you, physics or chemistry ?' — 'Chemistry.'
M. 906, E. 1079.
(6) ' Among apples, pears, cherries, &c. (nine others
named), which do you like better, grapes or cherries ?'-
'Cherries.' 'Among ten trees named, which more pictur-
esque, lime or oak? ' — ' Oak.' 'Among ten colours named,
which goes better with blue, yellow or green ? ' — ' Yellow."
M. 694, K. 659.
(7) ' Most important German river?' — ' Rhine.' ' Finest of
Goethe's dramas?' — 'Faust.' ' Your favourite French poet?'
— ' Corneille.' M. 962, E. 1137.
(8) ' Which lies more to the west, Berlin or the most
important German river? ' — ' Ehine.' ' Which letter comes
later in alphabet, L or the initial of the most beautiful
tree ? '— ' T ' (Tanne). M. 1844, E. 1866.
(9) ' Which lies more to the west, Berlin or the river on
which stands Cologne?' — ' Ehine.' 'Which is less, 15, or 20
minus 8 ? ' — '12.' ' Which letter comes earlier in alphabet,
P or initial of our emperor?' — 'F' (Frederick). M. 1291,
E. 1337.
(10) ' Among twelve bodily organs named, which larger,
hantl or what one smells with ? ' — ' H.' ' Among twelve
colours named, which brighter, blue or colour of sulphur ? '
' Yellow.' ' Among twelve poets named, which lived later,
Lessing or Byron ? '— ' Byron.' M. 1153, E. 1145.
Finally, (11) ' Which more impressive, the finest drama
of Shakespeare or finest opera of Wagner?' — 'Lohengrin.*
' Which more picturesque, the most beautiful fruit or the
most beautiful flower?' — ' Eose.' 'Which of greater im-
portance to man, the most important application of elec-
tricity or the most important use of gunpowder?' — 'Tele-
graph.' M. 2197, E. 2847. But here the 'mean variation'
was so exceptionally large that the limits of intellectual com-
plication with which direct experiment can effectively cope
appeared to be overpassed ; and, accordingly, the result was
discounted.
Now, of course, the value of these results , though they
seem to have been obtained with all imaginable care, must
not be overrated. Munsterberg himself is the first to see
what weakness there is in any of them ; as, e.g., especially
298 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
in all those of them — (5), (6), (7), (8) — that involve what he
calls a " subjective judgment of decision". Whether the
subjective estimate was asked for between two alternatives
only or within an indefinite range, the experimental decision
was (as it had to be) made with an aplomb far enough re-
moved from the hesitation of ordinary life ; — as was shown,
for one thing, by the disposition the reagent would immedi-
ately betray to go back upon the particular preference he
had so confidently expressed. Still it is evident that, from
(2) onwards, the more salient kinds of intellectual activity —
these, too, carried, from (7), to some considerable degree of
complication — are in a way fairly represented. And in this
view, not a little remarkable the results are. A free asso-
ciation, as in (2) — which Miinsterberg here calls "unre-
stricted judgment of relation " — has always been readily
understood to take shorter time than such a restricted asso-
ciation (or judgment) as is involved in (3) ; while this again
may take somewhat longer time than the singularised or
exclusive determination of (4). But, when the subjective
appreciation involved in (5) took by itself a time which
approximated to that of (3), it was certainly not to be ex-
pected that it could be superimposed, as in (7), upon the
work of (3) within a time, for the whole complex process,
which is practically the same as that of (3) by itself. Again,
while in (8) the addition of an act of exclusive choice to the
work of (7) brings the time up to a figure which, for M., is
almost double, it is curious to see how comparatively little
the same kind of addition to (4) increases the time of this
by itself. Once more, the shortening effect wrought upon
(5) and (9) by such a foregone enumeration of relevant
particulars as was .employed in ((i) and (10) is remarkable
enough. Other points, of interest might be noted in the
figures, as, e.g., between the two reagents, how R., although
(after the first simple reaction) his times are otherwise pretty
uniformly longer than M.'s, responds with exceptional swift-
ness under the peculiar conditions of (6) and (10). Most
important, however, is the main outcome of the whole series
of experiments, and this is — that the actual work of intellect
is done in a way which cannot be represented by any sum-
mation of such elements or factors of conscious experience
DE. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 299
as subjective analysis may discern in these or similar cases
of mental complication. If, wherever an ' apperceptive act '
can be noted in any of the foregoing associations or judg-
ments, it must be supposed to engross consciousness for the
time being — and this cannot but be supposed, whether or
not the ' act ' may admit of satisfactory physiological ex-
pression— then the time-values in the great majority of the
cases ought to have turned out larger, and to have been
otherwise very different (in comparison with one another)
from what they were found to be.
Taken together, the two researches in their different way
certainly point to one conclusion — that there is no such
difference between so-called voluntary and involuntary intel-
lection as Wundt's apperception-theory (or any other like
it) would make out. The effective mental work which gets
itself somehow performed in these experiments of Munster-
berg may be set down, in the language of subjective psycho-
logy, to activity of consciousness ; but this activity conforms
to no law that can in any way be traced, or, in other words,
no scientific account of it can be given. On the other hand,
the experimental results do not seem to withdraw themselves
from consistent psychophysical interpretation. In II., the
salient feature is the comparative shortening of time taken
up by the more complicated mental processes. Where there
is any marked increase of time for the complex over the
relatively simple, this is yet out of all proportion less than the
degree of complication (subjectively viewed) would seem to
require. In I., the salient feature is the practically constant
time within which intellectual acts (for they are, to all intents
and purposes, intellectual) of varying complexity are effected,
so soon as the performance is allowed to take place in the
way called unconscious. Here, unconscious performance
means that the motor result finally obtained is effected in a
way that is physiologically imaginable (though in detail it
cannot be actually traced). That is to say, there is understood
to be a physically continuous process all the way from where
stimulus is received till where, by more or less circuitous
cerebral route, the terminal station of overt impulse is reached.
But if the time between stimulus and reaction remains
(practically) constant though the cerebral work varies as
300 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
much as it must do between cases (4) and (7) of Miinsterberg's
first research, there must here be some overlapping of stages
in the whole brain-process, such as with physical process it
is not unimaginable there may be. Now the very point, it
will be remembered, of the first series of experiments was to
get work done which, though ' unconsciously ' performed, had
all the character of that kind of work which, before habit is
formed through practice, consciousness alone is supposed able
to effect. Where, then, as in the second research, it is a
question of understanding how conscious process may go for-
ward at a rate much swifter than could be if all the stages of
conscious activity apparently involved were in serial order
gone regularly through, — it lies to hand to suppose that the
real causal chain (eventuating in the final movement) is a
physical one of nerve-process, which, according to circum-
stances, may be more or less cut short.
Such is a general — very general — indication of the meaning
put by Mtinsterberg on his experiments. The English reader
will perhaps call to mind the passage in Mill's Examination
of Hamilton where, over against Hamilton's hypothesis of
' unconscious mental modification,' and Stewart's hypothesis
of fleeting conscious modification straightway forgotten, the
idea is thrown out that lapsed elements in trains of association
that continue effective may correspond to the opening of
physical short cuts through the brain ; the same mental
result being thus attained directly that would otherwise be
reached more circuitously with full consciousness. In Mill,
the supposition, where it is made, has a certain forced effect,
because in general he shows himself so little anxious to rely
upon psychophysical consideration or carry it through. It
is, accordingly, rather in the writings of so earnest a physio-
logical psychologist as Prof. Bain ; or of so fervent a deprecia-
tor of consciousness and all its works by the side of brain -
process as Dr. Maudsley ; or, again, of a thinker so firmly
convinced as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson that, after philosophical
analysis of experience, there is nothing left for psychology to
do but to find coherent physiological expression for the facts
of subjective consciousness, — it is in the writings of these
that the nearest English approaches must be sought to the
position taken up by Miinsterberg. But, as has been already
DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION. 301
said or implied, what distinguishes him from the writers
named, or from any others who in this country have conceived
of the physical series of nervous events as bearing the whole
causal strain (' causal ' understood phenomenally) of the
chequered play of mental life, is just the experimental art
which he brings to bear upon special questions of psychology ;
so that the position no longer remains open to the charge of
being a barren generality incapable of proof or disproof. Or,
rather, this is his first point of distinction ; for the present
attempt to draw attention to his work should not break off
without at least mention of one other notable feature in it.
It was rioted above, under II., how according to Miinsterberg
the demand, under any kind of experimental conditions, for
even the least restricted association involved already some act
of judgment on the part of the reagent. But, if in this way
he made good the continuity of his experimental tests from
simple up to complex judgments, it is not thus that he leaves
the question (as between Association and Apperception) at
the final stage of psychophysical interpretation. If his
general formula is to stand — that all activity or change of
consciousness must admit of being represented as change of
conscious content — the explicit judging (or choosing) at one
end of his experimental scale should, equally with the implicit
judging at the other, bear to be expressed in terms of Associa-
tion. He has, therefore, to grapple at length (pp. 123-41)
with the psychological question of the exact nature of the
associative process and of Thought in relation to it. It is the
question which English Associationists have tried always,
more or less directly, to face, — never more directly (upon a
line of his own) than in the article on " Association and
Thought " by Mr. F. H. Bradley in Mind, xii. 354. Miinster-
berg's treatment is of a range and character to which no
justice can be done 011 the present occasion, but it is specially
commended to the notice of readers — for more reasons than
one. As a piece of subjective analysis, it shows, in comparison
with most of the English efforts, a superior grasp of the
precise issues in question ; and it is worked out — as the best
English treatment has not always been, and sometimes has
not been at all — with an eye kept steadily fixed on the
physiological aspect of the case. One point only may now
302 DR. H. MUNSTERBERG ON APPERCEPTION.
be noted, in this (latter) view. Miinsterberg takes side with
those who reduce all association to the one form of ' Contiguity,
but finds himself also obliged to go further, and limit this to
the single case of ' Coexistence-in-time '. It is not clear to
me that he thereby overcomes the very serious difficulty there
is in getting a satisfactory physiological expression for
' Contiguous Association ' (as very serious difficulty there is,
in spite of what one could write, with the brave confidence of
youth, in the Encyc. Brit., 9th ed., art. " Association "). But
the exact crux, as it has now long seemed to me, of the
matter I have not elsewhere seen so clearly expressed or
apprehended as by Munsterberg from p. 130.
These remarks must for the present suffice. Dr Munster-
berg is fulfilling his promise of serial publication so punctually
that there will be occasion enough to return upon his work. It
is a work of genuine research that is all the more remarkable
from being done (as I have read somewhere) without any of
the official aids and facilities that belong to a higher academic
status than he has yet attained. Among the psychological
•questions which he has most made his own — in connexion
with the half-dozen or more researches he has so far pub-
lished, as well as in his earlier essay on the Act of Will — is
that deep-going and far-reaching one of ' Muscular Sense '.
The decided position, after more than commonly circumspect
consideration, which he takes up on this critical subject,
will, it is hoped, not be passed over the next time his work is
had under review.
SOME NEWLY DISCOVEKED LETTEKS OF
HOBBES.1
DR. F. TONNIES has discovered, in the National Library at
Paris, seventeen letters of Hobbes to the French physician
Sorbiere, who saw the De Give through the Amsterdam press
in 1(347, translated it into French in 1649, followed it in 1652
with a French translation of the De Corpore Politico, and
remained Hobbes's devoted admirer to .the last. Dying in
1670, Sorbiere left a large mass of correspondence which he
had carried on with the notorieties of his time; and this was
presently prepared for the press by his son, but did not get
into print. It is in the MS. collection so prepared (now
preserved in the Paris library) that the Hobbes-letters have
been found. Dr. Tonnies gives the whole seventeen at full
length (omitting only some useless mathematical matter
from the 16th) in the Archiv f. Gesck. d. Phil., iii. 58-71,
192-232, with related letters of Sorbiere himself, Mersenne
and others, and the necessary commentary ; this last marked
(in spite of some doubtful statements) by all the high char-
acteristics that have distinguished his previous writing on
Hobbes. He quotes as from Nicerou (Memoires des Hommes
illustres, iv. 96) a reference to the unpublished collection
(prepared by the younger Sorbiere, 1673) which I cannot
find in the 1727 edition ; but as to the genuineness of the
Hobbes-letters there can be no question with any one that
knows those facts and circumstances of the philosopher's
life upon which they cast a welcome new light. Five of the
seventeen — not the most interesting of the series — did (ac-
cording to Dr. Tonnies) get into print as early as 1669, in
a small collection issued by Sorbiere himself, which has be-
come one of the rarest of bibliographical curiosities. Below
are given, with a minimum of comment, the first nine, having
reference to the really important period of Hobbes's life and
1 Mind, xv. 440.
804 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
work that led up to Leviathan in 1651. After the 9th letter
in 1649, a break ensued in the correspondence, and, when
it was resumed from 1656, the (eight) letters that have been
preserved (till 1663) are of such minor importance — having
reference mainly to the scientific polemics of Hobbes's old
age — that they may be left to the scholar to seek out in the
Archiv. The general reader, on the other hand — if not de-
terred by the careless Latin in which so great a master of
English, arid also in his books effective enough Latin stylist,
was content to write familiarly — will find in the earlier
letters not a few points of biographical or philosophical
interest. Extant letters of Hobbes were before few in
number.
The first letter bears upon the new edition of De Give
which, from 1646, Sorbiere had undertaken to bring out at
the Elzevir press. The book, under title of Elementorum
Philosophiae Sectio Tertia, De Give, had appeared, quarto
size, in 1642, at Paris ; not anonymously (as Dr. Tonnies,
misled by some correspondence at the time between Sorbiere
and Martel, another French friend of Hobbes, supposes) but
still only with the initials ' T. H. ' at end of the dedicatory letter
to the young Earl of Devonshire. The few copies then
printed having, as Gassendi said, excited rather than satisfied
thirst, Hobbes was prevailed on by Sorbiere, who towards
1645 had become personally known to him, to make a more
effective publication. For this he provided a new preface
and footnotes, while Gassendi and Mersenne supplied com-
mendatory epistles. In the letter are to be noted his general
distrust of professional rivals and his special suspicion of
Descartes (whose correspondence, however, shows no mean
appreciation of the De Give on its first appearance) ; cp.
Hobbes (' Blackwood's Phil. Classics '), p. 58.
I. Ex literis tuis ad D. Martellum nostrum quibus te
venisse Hagam cognovi incolumem, hoc ipso die (mi Sorberi
dilectissime) cepi voluptatem, quam tua bonitas et timor
itinerum, incommoda atque pericula sola recordantis, non
patiebantur esse mediocrem. Itaque quod molestis illis
cogitationibus primo tempore me liberaveris, id quoque
ainicissime a te factum est. Quod in iisdem literis praefa-
SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBE8. 305
tionem meam laudas, secunda voluptas erat, riam et delector
judicio tuo, et quamquam nimium laudas, tamen affectus
quo id facis ad id quod ago utilis est, nam ut typographo
spes fiat fore ut liber ille vaeniat, laudatoribus et magnis et
quibus credi possit opus est. Itaque et D. Gassendus et K.
P. Mersennus librum ilium hyperbolice laudaverunt, mihi
arte [ ? certe ; potius quam sibi satisfacientes ; quorum
utriusque literas jam pridem te puto accepisse. Quae
editionem impedire posse videntur, sunt primo si ejusmodi
librum scierint sub praelo esse ii qui dominantur in Acade-
miis, ad quorum pertinet existimationem ne quis in ea
doctrina quam profitentur viderit quod illi prius non
vidissent. Itaque tacite peragendum est, nee quaerenda
testimoiiia nisi quae obtineri posse certo scias. Neque ergo
si prohiberi potest, typographo permittendum est homines
suo ipsius judicio doctos de libri utilitate consulere. Deinde
cavendum est ab iis qui cum pleraque probent, reliqua
improbant, nam magistros agunt, ac laude quam privatim
ipsi mihi tribuunt contentum me debere esse putant, pub-
licam invidebunt. Praeterea, si id agi ut edatur liber meus
(vel hie vel quilibet alius) sentiat vel suspicetur D. Des-
Cartes, certo scio impediturum esse si potest, quod unum
velim mihi credas qui scio. Caeteram cautelam omnem tibi
permitto. Nam et prudentiam et voluntatem in me tuam
penitus perspectarn habeo. Cum spem edendi videris ali-
quam, fac me quaeso certiorem quam primum potes, ut earn
spem, si fieri possit, mecum Montalbanum feram: Illuc
iturus sum cum D. Martello, qui et causa mihi eundi maxi-
ma est, quanquam accedat altera haec ut perficiendae parti
primae meorum Elementorum majore otio vacare possim.
Ibimus circa finem mensis proximi, aut aliquanto citius.
Vale. Tuus devinctissimus, Thomas Hobbes. Parisiis
Maj. 16. 1646.
The second letter replies to one from Sorbiere, which
appears to have crossed (rather than answered) the first.
The shortened title of the book, when it finally came out in
1647, was Elementa philosophica de Give. What Hobbes
says of his work up to date upon the De Corpore is, otherwise,
the thing of most importance in the letter. As to " Opticae
20
306 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
meae," cp. Hobbes, p. 59. The "Johnson" who had
promised to send him the physical system of Regius (Lie
Roi, Descartes' eager follower) is mentioned in Sorbiere's
letter in an accidental conjunction, which is too odd not to
be quoted here: " Quam gratum fecerim viris sumniis,
solideque philosophantibus, Boswellio, Johnsonio, Bornio,"
&c.
II. Literis tuis quas a D. Martello proxime accepi mag-
nopere delectatus sum. Fructum enim omnis operae et
laboris praeteritae amplissiinum fero, quod placeant ea quae
scripsi viris illis tantis quos nominasti, et tibi quoque ; spem
fecisti fore ut edantur. Quod scribis videri Elzevirio, si
prodeat liber tanquam pars majoris operis nonduni editi,
homines ilium minus libenter empturos esse, ego idem
censeo, quare mutetur titulus, fiatque simpliciter DE GIVE.
Caeterum mutationem tituli sequitur necessitas ea loca
tolleudi, in quibus mentio aliqua fit sectionis praecedentis,
quae quidem loca non multa sunt, nee talia quae non
possunt tolli facillime, excepto initio capitis primi quod
poterit esse huiusmodi : Naturae humanae facultates ad
quatuor genera reduci possunt : vim corpoream, experientiam,
rationem, affectum. Ab his sequentis doctrinae initium
capientes inquiremus primo loco quid animi habeant homines
illis facultatibus praediti, alteri adversus alteros. Et an.
Item initio capitis quinti pro his verbis Ostensum est sectione
praecedenti substitui haec possunt Manifestum per se est.
Caeteris locis cum mentio sectionis praecedentis sub paren-
thesi tantummodo fiat, poterit ea sine hiatu, sine incommode
deleri, et pag. 4 linea 21 et pag. 17 linea 15 et fortasse uno
aut alio loco alias. Tollantur ergo eae parentheses, et fiat
titulus ut dixi brevis simplexque DE GIVE, sed cavendurn
est ne superiorum capitum articulorumve citationes delean-
tur. Itaque nisi ubi vox sectio occurrit, nil movendum est.
Quod in Elementorum meorum sectione prima tamdiu ver-
sor, partim quidem causa est pigritia ; sed maxime quod in
sensibus meis explicandis non facile placeo mihimet ipsi.
Nam quod in doctrina morali fecisse me spero, id quoque in
Philosophia prima, et in Physica facere studeo, ne locus sit
relictus contrascriptori. Attamen de ea absolvenda intra
SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES. 307
annum vertentem, modo vivam et valeam, minime dubito.
Itaque ut rei magis vacem, stat secedere rus, praesertim
Montalbanum, nostri Cl. Martelli gratia. Expectatio ami-
coram excitat industriam meam aliquantulum, sed tu me
blanditiis tuis ad scribendum potenter adigisti atque impul-
isti. Accedit quoque quod ipse Opticae meae (quarn anglice
scriptam dedi Marchioni de New Castel) firmitate et robore
delectatus, cupiam primo tempore emittere earn latine. D.
lohnsonnius promisit mihi brevi se missurum D. Regii
Systema Physicum ; ut id fiat quam primum quaeso adjuva.
Vidi enim jam quaedam dogmata ejus physica in libro quo-
dam medico, quae mihi valde placuerant. Vir optime, vale.
Parisiis luni 1° 1646. D. Gassendo salutem tuo nomine
dicam eras ; aegrotat a febre quae tamen nunc leviuscula
est. Mersennus nondum rediit.
The third letter answers more than one from Sorbiere,
who had conceived no ordinary expectations on learning
that Hobbes (towards the end of summer) had been ap-
pointed tutor to the Prince of Wales, now come to Paris as
a fugitive (cp. Hobbes, p. 63). Hobbes, in the important
final paragraph, tells how completely and for what reasons
his engagement (as mathematical teacher) was devoid of all
political significance. The " Epigramma D1 Bruno" was a
legend composed by an admirer for the portrait that was to
be given with the De Give.
III. Clarissime charissimeque Sorberi cum a te ad Mar-
tellutn nostrum diu nullae literae venissent cogitabam mecum
modo typographum rescripsisse, modo folium aliquod libri
vel annotationum interiisse. Nam de valetudine tua et
tuorum nolui, de conatu tuo non potui, dubitare. Sed
quidquid erat impediment!, curn nescire moleste ferrem,
rogavi D. Martellum ut de ea re ad te scriberet. Id quod
nunc factum nollem. Accepta enim epistola tua, tantas tibi
gratias debere me sentio ut querelarum poeniteat et pudeat,
si tamen ille quicquam questus est, nam rogavi ut quaereret,
non ut quereretur.
Literas tuas ad D. G-assendurn et P. Mersennum (una
cum epigrammate D1 Bruno) illis curavi tradendas.
308 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
Quod attinet ad folium impressum quod misisti, valde mihi
placet et character literarum, et volumen, neque erratum
typorum quod alicuius sit monienti, ullum reperio, praeter
uiium (sed magnum) pag. 14 1. 2 ubi pro Duritas ponitur Clari-
tas. Dixi conclusionis Duritatem praemissarum memoriam
expellere : id quod verum est. Contra fuisset si dixissem Clari-
tatem. Duae illae voces scripturam habent fere similem ; prop-
ter quam causaru, et quia forte putabat typorum compositor
vocem hanc Duritas non esse latinam (nam saepius dicitur
Durities) factum est ut pro Claritate accepta sit. Vox Duri-
tas latina est et Ciceroniana, cum sermo sit de dictis duris,
quamquam de corporibus duris Durities potius usurpatur.
Quod scribis te sedem Leydae fixurum, vehementer gaudeo,
cum tui causa qui conversabere cum doctissimis viris, turn
mei qui amicis meis illic euntibus quo gratum facere possim
tua ope habiturus sum. Scripsi nuperrime (ante tamen quam
acciperem literas tuas) ad Comitem Devoniae patronum
meum cui films est sex [sc. annorum ?} et unicus, ad quern
instituendum opus est viro. Ex tua, Gassendi Martelli
commendatione cognovi esse D. Du Prat. Si ille condi-
tionem merito eius convenientem [cupiet ?] , enitar quantum
possum, utriusque causa, ut se Lugduno Londinum trans-
ferat.
Quod mihi de praesente loco gratulatus sis, agnosco
benevolentiam tuam. Sed cave ne earn rem majoris putes
esse quam est. Doceo enim Mathematicam, non Politicam.
Nam praeceptis politicis quae habentur in libro qui in-
primitur, imbui ilium, ipsius aetas uondum sinit, et judicia
eorum, quorum consiliis aequum est regi ilium, semper
prohibebunt. Si quid ego diuturno officio gratiae apud eum
collegero, scias me eo usurum omni, non tarn ad meas quam
ad amicorum meorum commoditates, et ad tuorum quoque si
aliquos commendaveris. Sed multum sperare neque humili-
tas mea neque aetas patitur. Vale Charissime Sorberi, et
ama Tuum Th. Hobbes. Dab. S. Germ. Octob. 4. 1646.
In the fourth letter, with continued anxious care for the
correct printing of his book, there is again sign of Hobbes's
grudge against Descartes : he can no longer hope much of
Regius, content to copy that original.
SOME NEWLY DISCOVEBED LETTERS OF HOBBES. 809
IV. Amice clarissime, accepi lain duo a te epistolas in
quarum priore quam acceperam ante dies circiter viginti,
folium prinium incluseras, atque etiam duas epistolas, alteram
ad E. P. Mersemmm alteram ad D. Gassendum, quas
ambas illis dari curavi diligeriter; et statim rescripsi. In
posteriore accipio nunc tria simul folia prima cum literis ad
DD. Martellum et Prataeum quas ad eos jam transmittam.
In superiore mea epistola notavi erratum typorum unum
pag. 14 1. 2, nempe Claritas pro Duritas. In secundo folio
noto jam duo alia magni momenti, quaeque sententiam
corrumpunt, pag. 48 lineis 19 et 23, nimirum vox quaerere lin.
19 et vox Ergo linea 23, quae ambae delendae sunt, iiam illis
stantibus sensus nullus est, deletis optimus est. Nescio
quomodo voces illae irrepserint, aut quia periodus longa non
satis a typorum compositore comprehendebatur, illi visum
est locum sic emendare, aut ego redigendo ilium locum ita
putavi emendandum esse, cum non esset opus, narn in ex-
emplari impresso Parisiis illae voces non sunt. Video
periculum rnagnurn esse ne in aliis quoque locis similiter
erretur, cum neque mea scriptura satis distincta sit, neque
ego neque tu praesentes simus ; sin accidat ut reliquum libri
sine magnis mendis impressum fuerit, non gravabor meis
impensis paginam illam 48 cum adhaerentibus denuo im-
primere. Alioqui corrigenda sunt errata, et ante initium
libri in conspectum danda sunt, ut ab ipsis lectoribus corrigi
possint.— Expecto iam ut Physica Regii Parisiis venalis fiat ;
etsi enim de spe mea verba ilia (copie de celuy de M. des
Cartes) aliquantum detriverint, cupio tamen videre quid sit
cuius causa librum ilium tanta fama antecessit. Agam
quantum potero cum D. Gassendo ut quicquid imprimendum
habet vobis transmittat, sed agam cum fuero Parisiis, id est,
ut opinor circa medium Novembrem ; quamquam si in ea re
tuis literis non moveatur, minus movebitur sermone meo.
Nil aliud occurrit quod scribam, nisi ut gratias agam tantis
omen's tantaque benevolentia dignas ; quod est omnino
impossibile ; crede tamen animum mihi esse gratissimum
amantissimumque tui, etsi non sum ita blandus ut ad
millesimam partem blanditiarum quae sunt in epistolae
tuae fine attingere possim. Jamais homme ne receut si
grand compliment que vous m'avez fait ; mais je ne le reuoy
310 SOME NEWLY DISCOVEEED LETTERS OP HOBBES.
point, neantmoins je vous en remercie. Vale. Tuus Thomas
Hobbes. St. Germ. Oct. 22. 1646.
The fifth letter refers to the "portrait (before mentioned)
which Sorbiere had got engraved, but which could not be
used because the publisher had reduced the size of the
volume from the quarto first intended. As for Gassendi,
here and elsewhere so often mentioned, if there was one man
who was more than Hobbes to Sorbiere, it was he.
V. Domine clarissime, amicissime. Accepi heri literas
tuas datas pridie Kal. Nov. atque una duo folia, in quibus
erratum est iiullum, praeterquam quae ipse in margine
correxisti levia ; consentio tibi ne alia mittas donee totus
liber impressus sit. De icone incisa gratias tibi ago, et ne
libro praeponatur facile patior. Epistolam tuam ad Prataeum
ferendam eras dabo. Martellus noster Montalbani est, scrip-
sit inde ad me semel, exierat Parisiis circa finem Septembris.
Do ad eum literas hodie in quibus id quod de illo ad me
scripseras, insero. D° Gassendo salutem tuo nomine dixi
hodie ; in morbum a quo paulo ante convaluerat, rursus
ceciderat, nunc autem rursus convalescit. Conveniendi
Mersennum et salutem tuam ei impertiendi mihi St. German -
um repetenti ternpus non est. Faciam proximo tempore ;
ab initio Decembris usque ad Festum Paschalis futuri sumus
Parisiis. Illic si Prataeum tuum convenire potero, amicitiam
cum eo facere conabor. Cura ut valeas. Tui amantissimus,
Thomas Hobbes. Parisiis die II. ° Novemb. 1646.
Though Sorbiere had, in fact, sent off a bound copy of
the finished work on 29th Jan., 1647, Hobbes had not re-
ceived it a month later, and writes as follows about the delay
of publication : —
VI. Mi Sorberi dilectissime, quod diutius jam quam meum
desiderium atqiie amicitia tua requirebat scribendi ad te
officium praetermiserim, causa est tua epistola ultima qua
admonebar ne librum meum amplius foliatim expectarem
sed totum simul via aliqua quae videretur tibi commodissima.
Illud igitur de hebdomade in hebdomadem expectans nolui
crebris literis videri flagitare, quod sciebam te quam primum
SOME NEWLY DISCOVEEED LETTERS OF HOBBES. 311
fieri posset sponte factururn. Nunc cum tres menses elapsi
sunt ex quo impressio libelli tantuli finiri poterat, cumque
arnicas tuus Dns Musart, operam suam in mittendis ad te
his literis ultro mihi obtulit, praetereunda commoditas ea
uon videbatur. Itaque te oro ut si quid impressioni oblatum
impedimentum sit, certiorem me facias. Tuorum denique
erga me officiorurn cumulo hoc addas ut rescribas, turn ut
quando liber ille expectandus sit, turn quod me amare non
desisti certo sciam. Mersennus et Gassendus te salutant
beneque valent. Te bene valere et cupio et spero. Tui
amantissimus, Thomas Hobbes. Parisiis Feb. 28. 1647.
Ad Martellum nostrum scripsi saepius, nihil rescribit,
neque ubi sit neque an sit scio.
Next comes the letter (not before published) of greatest
interest. Sorbiere had written in March, telling of the
copy sent in January and of twenty unbound copies to follow
as soon as possible by Elzevir consignment ; meanwhile
enclosing the first sheet, title-page and a portrait " minus
bene expressam " (brought down, apparently, to the reduced
size of the book), and promising with the later copies some
complimentary verses " Brunonis nostri " (who had written
the legend for the original portrait) ; at the same time urging
him to let the publisher have his other works, since so many
copies of the De Give had already been disposed of. Hobbes's
reply is in many ways remarkable. Finding himself desig-
nated (by the tuft-hunting Sorbiere) on the portrait as
" Serenissimo Principi Walliae a studiis praepositus," he
makes, in nervous fear of the possible consequences, all the
eager suggestions for undoing of the error with which the
letter is filled. New light is thrown upon his relations with
the prince and the royalist refugees ; but most curious of all
is the disclosure of his thought thus early of return to
England — more than two years earlier than the previous
evidence (cp. Hobbes, p. 65) gave any notion of, and more
than four years before the return actually carne to pass. It
now looks as if he might have been thinking of possible
return from the time that his patron, the young Earl of
Devonshire, had gone back and submitted himself to the
revolutionary government in the previous year (perhaps end
812 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
of 1645). The point is of no little significance, in connexion
with the charges made against him on the publication of
Leviathan in 1651 and his flight from Paris to London which
then ensued. The reference to Mersenne at the end of the
letter gives Dr. Tonnies occasion to bring forward, from the
outlying (but related) correspondence, the interesting fact
that Mersenne himself and Gassendi resented, as Catholics,
the publication of their laudatory letters with the De Give,
when they had written them only for the publisher. Having
acted in the teeth of Mersenne's previously expressed wish,
Sorbiere had afterwards to make what apology he could. In
the letters between Sorbiere and Mersenne, there are obvious
errors of transcription which Dr. Tonnies does much to clear
up. I have little doubt, as he also in the end thinks most
likely, that Sorbiere is wrongly represented (in transcript)
as having got the two letters withdrawn from the edition :
they stand in my, as they stand in his, copy of 1647. On
the other hand, Hobbes's urgent wish for excision of the
portrait must have been gratified, for none is given, while
the figured title-page bears the simple ' Auctore, Thorn.
Hobbes, Malmesburiensi '.
VII. Eruditissimo viro D. Samueli Sorberio Amico sincero
suo Thomas Hobbes.
Literas tuas, vir clarissime, datas Lugduui BatavorUm 4°
Nonis Martii, accepi traditas mihi a Mersenno una cum
primo folio in quo est imago mea. Quam quidem certo scio
a te optima in me voluntate libro praefixam. Veruntamen
ita se res habet, temporaque ejusmodi sunt, ut magno
emptum vellem ut vel praefixa non esset, vel saltern sub-
scriptio ilia Serenissimo Principi Walliae a studiis praepositus
sublata exculpta vel abscissa esset. Primo enim, id quod est
maximum, qui hodie rerum Angliae potiuntur, causas omnes
quibus Stirpem Regiam in invidiam apud plurimos conjiciant
undiquaque sedulo conquirunt atque arripiunt. Cum ergo
viderint rloctrinae civili adeo ab opinionibus fere omnium
hominum abhorrenti praeferri nomen ejus, jactabunt se
inimici magnifice, et etiam odiose, in eo quod quale Imperii
jus expectat arrogaturusque sibi sit, jam nunc videtur
praemonstrare. Quare quicquid hide mali eveniat, vel evenire
SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES. 318
posse praetendi potuit ab illis qui in Aula Principis orune
peccaturn meum interpretationibus et scholiis suis inflarnmare
parati surit, id omne cum meo summo dedecore ineptiae et
vanae gloriae meae imputabitur. Secundo hoc titulo reditus
meus in patriam, si me quando redeundi voluntas ceperit,
praeclusus est, nee cur redire non velim si liceat quomo-
docunque pacata Anglia non video ; non sum enim Praecep-
tor Principis Walliae, nee omnino domesticus (quae causa
tertia est quare nollem titulum ilium subscribi) sed qualis
quilibet eorum qui decent in mensem. Itaque mentitum me
esse dicent prae ambitione qui mihi male volunt ; sunt ii non
pauci. Doleo ergo tot exemplaria jam emissa divenditaque
esse. Sed quia id corrigi non potest, demus quaeso operam
ut ab iis exemplaribus quae apud Elzevirios reliqua sunt,
effigies vel inscriptio, mallem utraque, quamprimum tollatur
idque priusquam ulla in Angliam transmittantur. Hoc ab
Elzeviriis vel prece vel pretio impetrandum est, pretio gi
videbitur liber minoris venalem fore sublata imagine vel
inscriptione, quod non credo, sed tamen pretio si necesse est.
Agam interea hie cum Petito bibliopola ut earn tollat ex suis
si quae habuerit (nondum enim allati sunt 21 illi libri quos
scribis esse in sarcinis Elzevirianis, neque venit ille cui
tradideras librum compactum), et scribam ad bibliopolam
quendam Londinensem amicum meum, ut idem fieri curet,
si quae istic exemplaria venalia esse contigerit. D. Brunonis
benevolentiam gratissime amplector, neque in votis quicquam
magis habeo quam ut officio meo officia ejus mereri possim ;
tamen hoc tempore nullos versus libro praeponi volo quos
non ante viderim, turn ne, quod animo et ingenio factum est
bono, temporibus fiat mihi non bonum, turn etiam ne aviditas
gloriae illius in testimonium ducatur, tanquam etiam indebi-
tum ilium titulum cupiverim Praeceptoris Principis. Non
est in toto hoc negotio quod mea culpa admissum est cui
status rerum nostrarum minime cognitus erat. Est quod a
te corrigi possit, et propterea quod te oro obsecroque, nimirum
id quod dixi ante, ut quamprimum hanc acceperis epistolam,
Elzevirium Lugdunensem convenire velis, atque impetrare
primum ab eo ut ex illis quae ipse habet exemplaribus
effigiern tollat, deinde per eum ut frater ejus qui est Amstelo-
dami, idem faciat, vel si quo alio modo desiderium meum
314 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
hac in re adimplere possis ut id facere velis. Molesta est
haec epistola propter materiam, non faciam ergo ut molesta
quoque sit prolixitate. Nihil addo nisi ut valeas, meque
adhuc, ac nunc quurn maxime opus est, ames. Tui amantis-
simus Thomas Hobbes. Parisiis 22 Martii 1647. Mersen-
nus et omnes amici nostri permagni dicunt interesse et mei et
Principis Walliae ut inscriptio vel potius tota effigies tollatur.
Si ut fiat opus sit pecunia non nimis magna, solvam libenter.
Iterumque vale.
The eighth letter gives particulars of the illness that nearly
carried Hobbes off in the autumn of 1647. The edition of
the De Give had gone off in a very few months, and Elzevir
was now pressing for another. As to other work with which
Hobbes was occupied, and which he had apparently been too
much excited about the unlucky inscription of the portrait
to refer to in letter 7th, it is to be noted that he speaks in
the 8th, and, eighteen months later, in letter 9th, of the De
Corpore only. There is no word anywhere of Leviathan,
which, from 1646, was uppermost with him till 1651.
VIII. Eruditissimo praestantissimoque viro Samueli Sor-
berio Thomas Hobbes S. P. D.
Literas tuas datas quarto die Octobris accepi hebdomade
proxime superiore. In qua quoniam libri mei editionem
alteram Elzevirium cogitare scribis, ecce mitto tibi inclusum
in hac epistola folium in quo quid mutatum esse vellem
annotavi. Nihil autem in eo folio continetur praeter errata
quaedam prioris impressionis, non enim habeo quicquam
quod addam aut demam. Aliam partem Philosophiae
Elementorum nondum paratam ullam habeo; nam^ circa
medium mensem Augusti in febrem incidi gravissimam et
continuam, ita ut non modo corpore aeger, sed etiam mente
laesus, neque amicos qui me visebant, lecto astantes recog-
noscere potui. Febris ea in lecto me detinuit per hebdomadas
sex, postea abiens erupit in apostemata quae hebdomadas
quatuor alteras lecto me affixerant, postremo sanatis aposte-
matibus supervenit ischiadica eaque maximis cum doloribus.
Nunc autem aliquanto me tractat mitius, sinitque ut ani-
mum ad amicorum res convertam aliquando. Per tempora
SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES. 315
morbi priora accepi a te epistolam imam in qua irivoluta erat
altera ad D. du Prat quam (ubi coepi paulum a febri et
delirio respirare) dedi cuidam ex amicis meis Parisiis
ferendam dandamque tabellario publico. Nisi morbus inter-
venisset, perfecissem, credo, partem philosophiae primam
quae est de Corpore ; ut autem nunc se res habet, earn
partem circa festum Penticostes expectare poteris ; nihil est
quo amplius te detineam, cum valetudine, et perge me amare.
Datum Germani 27 Novembr. 1647.
IX. Duplici gaudio me affecit (ornatissime Sorberi) amicus
tuus dominus Guatelier, qui et te salvum esse nuntiavit, et
mihi a te salutem dixit. Ego tibi rescribo imprimis vota
mea, ut bene valere laetus vivere et mihi bene velle perseve-
res ; deinde, si tanti est, curas meas, id est studia philo-
sophica quae tu aliique amici mei et voce flagitant et silentio
interdum videntur flagitare.
Quantum cura valetudinis, et erga amicos quos hie habeo
praesentes officiorum meorum ratio, sinit, tantum operae
scriptioni impertio, scriptioni inquam, 11011 enim iam quae-
rendae sed explicandae demonstrandaeque veritatis labor edi-
tionem moratur. Puderet me tantae tarditatis nisi certus
essem rationem ejus in ipso opere satis constitutam esse.
Veruntamen non ita longe abesse videor a fine prirnae partis
(quae et maxima est et speculationis quam ceterae partis
profundioris), ut non possim (Deo favente) eo pervenire ante
exactam hanc aestatem. Interea tabulis aeneis figuras quibus
utor in demonstrationibus meis, quotidie incidi euro, ut
simulac scribere desierim, omnia praelo parata sint. Accipio
quandoque literas ab amico nostro Domino Martello, et
accepi nuper ; degit plerumque, credo, Buldigalae. Bene
valet et me amat. Tu quoque vale (optime Sorberi) et me
ama. Tui amantissimus, Thomas Hobbes. Parisiis Junio
14. 1649.
Leaving aside the remaining eight letters (from 1656) as
unimportant, it should be added, with reference to Dr.
Tbnnies's interesting discussion of the circumstances and
motives of Hobbes's return in 1651, that the conjecture he (at
a distance) hazards as to the beautiful MS. of Leviathan in
816 SOME NEWLY DISCOVERED LETTERS OF HOBBES.
the British Museum — viz., that, as being presented to the
young king Charles II., it would hardly contain the bold
" Eeview and Conclusion " of the printed work — is not
correct. This epilogue, for all its outspoken independence,
duly figures at the end of the MS. ; and Clarendon, who
describes the presentation-copy as " engrossed in vellum in a
marvellous fair hand," must be left to settle with himself
(and with the others who took the idea from him) how, if
Hobbes wrote ' The Review,' &c., in order to curry favour
with Cromwell, he could be so rash and so rude as to thrust
it into the hands of the exiled prince.
MUNSTERBEKG ON ' MUSCULAK SENSE' AND
'TIME-SENSE'.1
THE first of the four researches occupying pt. ii. of Dr.
Miinsterberg's Beitrtige zur experimentellen Psycfiologie (see
Mind, No. 58, p. 234) 2 is a very good and characteristic speci-
men of his workmanship. It is concerned with that question
of ' Time-Sense' — meaning the comparative measurement of
short time-intervals — which has been one of the most constant
subjects of psychophysical inquiry for the last five and twenty
years, but which, owing to the bewildering variety of the
results obtained, cannot thus far be reckoned among the
triumphs of the experimental method. Miinsterberg carefully
reviews all the work that has previously been done upon the
subject, from Mach, Horing and Vierordt on to the younger
investigators in Wundt's laboratory ; embarks next upon a
far more searching introspective analysis than had yet been
attempted of the conditions and means of time-measurement ;
and, after gaining thereby some light upon the discrepant
and even opposed figures of the other experimental inquirers,
brings his own subjective results more or less decisively to the
test of positive experiment.
The inquiry bears directly on the general thesis of the
Beitraye—ih&t all so-called activity of consciousness must
admit of resolution into "change of conscious content" if
the psychophysical method is to be taken seriously and
consistently carried through. It is common to the later
time-researches (which have proceeded chiefly from the
Leipsic laboratory) to find, with whatever difference of
numerical values, a periodicity in the power of more or less
accurately estimating the comparative lengths of experi-
mental time-intervals. The only supposition so far advanced
to meet the facts has been to credit consciousness with a
faculty of directly apprehending such (short) intervals.
1 Mind, xv. 524. a P. 288, above.
318 MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'.
This faculty has been called ' Time-sense,' after Czermak,
who in 1858, without himself experimenting, gave the first
suggestion of specific inquiry to be made on the subject.
It is distinguished by Wundt (Phys. Psych., 3te Aufl., ii.
354) from our common estimation of the lapse of time —
allowed, so irregular as it is, to be dependent on the vary-
ing flow of representation. Now one result of Miinsterberg's
inquiry is to break down the distinction which it has thus
been sought to make between our rough natural judgment
of the length of considerable time-intervals and that delicate
appreciation of minute differences which takes place under
experimental conditions. In the one case, as in the other,
he finds a " content " present ; and all depends, in either
case, upon what the nature of the content is. Speaking
generally, the " content " proves, directly or remotely, to be
of that kind which goes most commonly by the name of
' Muscular Sense ' (because in some way connected with the
physiological process of muscle-innervation). The present
occasion requires, therefore, some definition of Miinsterberg's
position in regard to ' Muscular Sense ' ; and it is the more
necessary that this should not be deferred, because it is one
of the most characteristic features of his whole line of inquiry
that he shows the muscular factor to be everywhere im-
plicated in the psychophysical theory of mental life. It
figures with decisive effect in all the researches he has yet
published ; being even employed in the latest memoir (filling
pt. iii. of the Beitrdge) to account for the intensive character
of sensation generally, and thus giving ground for a daring
attempt to refound from the bottom the whole theory of the
quantitative relation between sensation and stimulus, to
which (since Fechner's time) the name of ' Psychophysic '
has mainly been limited. Upon that attempt, with its
underlying theory of intensity, all judgment is reserved; but
any remarks now made to clear the way for understanding
of the results, as striking as they are novel, obtained in
regard to ' Time-sense,' may yet be taken as having also
other application, of which more anon.
Miinsterberg's doctrine of ' Muscular Sense ' — to call this
here by its least question-begging appellation — is worked
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'. 319
out at length in his prior essay, Die Willenshandlung (see
Mind, xiii. 436), and is only summarily repeated in the
Beitrage. While not put forward as mediating between the
opposed theories that have thus far occupied the ground,
it yet may be regarded as helping in that way, and the more
deserves consideration on this account. Apparently, he
puts himself on the side of those who, of late years, with
gathering strength, have contended that all the sense-
experience in the case is peripherally determined — that
muscle has first to be got into the state of actual contraction
and afferent nerve-fibres in muscle itself or related parts
(ligament, joint, overlying skin or what not) have to be
thereby stimulated at their peripheral ends, with consequent
cerebral excitation, before anything that can be called ' sense '
arises. In other words, the supposition (as by Bain or
Wundt) of a specific subjective experience directly attending
the original cerebral outflow of nerve-impulse towards muscle
must be rejected. Yet, in fact, nobody could be more
decided on the point that, with all muscular action which we
are consciously aware of performing, there is other subjective
accompaniment than follows upon actual contraction at the
periphery. There is always, in such case, a prior state of
consciousness involved, a real (subjective) antecedent to the
innervation of the muscle or muscles concerned. In other
words, Wundt's ' innervation-feeling ' (or Bain's ' feeling of
muscular exercise,' ' feeling of energy put forth') stands for
an indubitable fact of experience. True, it is nothing that
can properly be called ' sense,' being, in point of fact, a
mere memorial representation (Erinnerungsbild) of foregone
muscular action now again to be put forth. But, besides
being thus inevitable antecedent of the coming contraction,
so much and so regularly is it also constant accompaniment
throughout the whole course of the muscular act that in
pathological circumstances, where this or that element of
present sensation (peripherally determined) may have dropt
out; it can supply in representative form all that is wanting
to the effective conscious account.
If this may be taken as a fair indication of the position
taken up by Miinsterberg on the question of 'Muscular
Sense,' I desire, without now considering how far it may
320 MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'.
have been before approached by others from the same side,
to call attention first to the significance of the concessions
it involves. It is allowed that in the muscular (or, as it is
commonly called, motor) attitude we are quite otherwise
conscious than in any state of mere sensible affection.
Whatever elements of (passive) sensation, peripherally
determined as in the case of all other passive affection, may
be shown to be present in the conscious account when
muscle is contracted, there is also never absent another
element of experience peculiar to this case and to this case
alone. In none of the special senses or the modes of
general sensibility does the conscious experience that arises
through stimulation of afferent nerve-fibres have as ante-
cedent other conscious experience, which, whether repre-
sentative or not, means a cerebral excitation already under
weigh before the brain is again excited by ingoing stimulus
from the periphery. Now Bain at least, with his 'Muscular
Sense ' proper, has always been concerned to establish
nothing so much as just this peculiarity of attitude in the
system (whether physically or psychically understood) when
muscular action is in process ; and, for the rest, both he
and in his own way Wundt have never overlooked the
elements of (passive) sensation inevitably bound up, by
constitution of the system, with the process of muscle-
innervation. To me, indeed, it has long seemed that,
whether regard be had to the elements of ' common sensation '
necessarily excited under muscular contraction or to the
procurement and variation of special sensations (sight, touch,
&c.) effected by exercise of particular muscles (of eye, hand,
&c.), the truest description of so-called ' Muscular Sense,'
for psychological purposes, will represent it as never other
than a co-efficient with this or that kind of passive sense to
a resultant in experience that is most aptly termed ' active
sense '. Though it may, by experimental artifice, be more
or less separated out from the accompaniment of special
sensation by which it is normally attended ; and though it
may even, with greater difficulty, be made to throw off this
or that element of common sensation ( ' organic sensibility ')
naturally implicated with it ; yet in perfect purity, i.e.,
without any concomitant of (passive) sensation — meaning
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE'. 3'21
sensation peripherally stimulated — I do not see how it can
ever in actual experience be found. This, however, should
not remain doubtful, that there is in it, as a kind of
conscious experience, something other than and prior to
any such sensation.
As to whether this prior element has an altogether re-
presentative character or may be claimed as, at least to
some extent, presentative — which is a way of expressing
what both Bain and Wundt assert by their use of the name
' feeling/ or also ' sensation,' for it — the point is one of
great interest, though its determination one way or the
other would not affect the main psychological issue. That
there must be representation involved, is not to be doubted.
The fact that the process of muscula? innervation, in the
case supposed, sets out from a cortical seat, however consti-
tuted or wherever situated this may be, implies that it must
be affected by all that has previously gone on in or through
that cortical area ; and this, in subjective language, means
' representation '. Why, even in the case of peripherally
stimulated sensation, where of course the stimulus has first
to reach the brain-centre before the sensation comes to pass
as conscious experience, it cannot be supposed that this,
though denominated ' sensation,' is so altogether presentative
in character that it is not, then and there, modified in
quality or otherwise by previous excitation of the same
centre — in other words, is not overlaid by ' representation '.
Let it then be frankly allowed that any particular muscular
innervation proceeding from the brain-cortex must have its
specific subjective phase — I mean that distinctively prior
or initial one now under consideration — inevitably modified
by the previous history of the ' centre ' concerned. And all
those who (like Miiiisterberg) have learned to regard the
physiological distinction of ' motor ' and ' sensory ' centres
as more or less artificial, may well hesitate to say what
amount of representation may not be involved in the
energising of whatever widespread or deep-going cerebral
plexus a particular muscular innervation takes its more
immediate start from. But just as there never has been any
hesitation in connecting some mode of presentative con-
sciousness, under name of ' sensation,' with cortical excita-
21
322 MUNSTERBERG ON ' MUSCULAR SENSE ' AND ' TIME-SENSE ' .
tion determined from the periphery — without reference to
the representation necessarily co-involved, and apart from
any question of the further course towards the efferent
(so-called 'motor') side of the system which an incoming
(so-called ' sensory ') stimulus always tends to pursue ; so,
when from within (i.e., apart from direct ' sensory ' stimulus)
a process is started which results in muscular innervation
at the periphery, it seems analogically justifiable to posit
an element of presentative consciousness in the case — over
and above anything in the way of representation not denied
to be necessarily implicated. The difference on the afferent
side of the system between sensation and representative
image is allowed to be one that depends only, or at least
mainly, upon degree of excitation ; this being (normally)
greater when determined from the periphery. How then
should there not be a corresponding difference of representa-
tive and presentative experience on the efferent side when
the cerebral process in one case is not, and in the other is,
effective in producing overt muscular contraction? The
force of the analogy, such as it is, can be turned aside only
by the kind of assumption which, for example, Bastiaii has
made, when he declares the organ of mind to be " that
portion only of the nervous system which has to do with
the reception, the transmission, and with the vastly multi-
plied co-ordination of 'ingoing currents.' in all kinds of
nerve-centres" (cp. Mind, vi. 128). But with an organic
whole like the nervous system, nothing .could well be more
perilous than such division.
The reference just made to Dr. Bastian, who among
English inquirers led the way and has maintained the lead
as advocate of what may be called the passive-sense theory
of ' Muscular Sense,' suggests another. A point that
remains to be noted in Miinsterberg's treatment (or ex-
pression) is common to him with his English predecessor.
Some ten years ago, in a review of The Brain as an
Organ of Mind, it was observed l that to speak, with
Bastian, of 'Muscular Sense' as 'Sense of Movement'
{' Kinaesthesis ') did not mark a step forward in psychological
1 Mind, vi. 127. See below.
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE*. 323
discernment. Bastian, to be sure, was not singular in
adopting that mode of expression, for it had been used by
Bain and others before as a convenient synonym. It has
also since that time been pretty freely employed, apparently
without heed to any difference of implication. Thus Miin-
sterberg, who generally uses the name Spannungsempfindung
or ' sensation of strain ' (cp. Bain's ' dead strain ') for the
whole aggregate of conscious experience representative and
presentative, attending the muscular act, does not hesitate
to give often as simple alternative Bewegungsempfindung or
' sensation of movement '. A little reflexion, I venture still
to think, should suffice to rule it out as either alternative or
substitute. ' Movement,' as such, is, no doubt, a notion of
prime importance in psychological explanation, and much
that appears simple to ordinary consciousness finds expres-
sion in terms of more or less complex motor representation ;
but, however potent an instrument of psychological reduc-
tion, movement cannot be held a simple datum of conscious
experience except with those to whom space and time appear
to be such data. Granted an original intuition of space and
time, and there need then be no difficulty in assuming a sense
— or, rather, intuition — of movement, importing with it the
relative apprehensions of time and space within which
movement has to proceed. But, if it is recognised that one
of the psychologist's first and chief tasks is to give genetic
account of our space- and time-apprehension (let the data
employed for this be what they may), how can ' movement '
help following suit? To Mtinsterberg at least, it is not
doubtful that space-perception is a synthesis of touch, sight,
&c., with ' muscle-sensation ' (as sometimes, e.g., "pt. ii. 25, be
does not fail to call it). I would urge then, not that
' muscle-sensation ' be never called anything else, but that
those who rely upon it as indispensable (original) factor in
the psychological account of space-apprehension should never
call it by the name of ' sensation of movement '. They can-
not do so without laying themselves open to the charge of
having already virtually assumed space (and time) as simple
original intuitions and thus of solemnly playing out the
farce of vo-Tepov -rrporepov. ' Movement,' in short, from the
psychogenetic point of view, is a complex perception, as ill-
324 MiJNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE*.
fitted as possible to be the designation (subjectively meant)
of an original sense-experience. It is not ' movement ' that
we are originally conscious of in the case of muscle-contrac-
tion— were it only because, in point of fact, movement is by
no means always the result of getting into the muscular
attitude. Moreover, when movement does result, it is
movement of limb, head, &c., that in fact takes place and
that we are conscious of, — not movement of muscle (as in a
loose way, with more or less of physiological reflexion, we
come to say). Now, surely, movement of limb or the like is,
subjectively regarded, most complex perception. Thus, on
every ground, ' movement ' is to be deprecated as subjective
designation of the simple sense-experience. For this we must
rather fall back upon and adhere to such words as ' tension,'
' strain ' or ' effort,' which — though they too (like most other,
if not all, psychological terms) are not without an objective
meaning and application — can consistently be used with an
import at once subjective and simple. To 'muscle-sensation,'
on the other hand, no exception can be taken, provided it is
meant for no more than mere external designation as when
we speak of ' eye-sensation,' 'skin-sensation,' or the like.
Turning now to the special question of ' Time-sense,' it is
impossible for any one to read such an account as W'undt
gives (Phys. Psych., ii. 348-59) of the experimental results
hitherto obtained and not to be struck most of all by their
extreme discrepancy. The time certainly had come for
asking what it might be that was rendering so futile ah1 that
expenditure of scientific skill and patience. Prof. Cattell,
when giving in Mind, a year or two ago, some general
account of the psychological work that had been done in the
Leipsic laboratory, made in regard to the time-experiments
& suggestion as to unavoidable error in the method adopted ;
but this applied rather to the discrepant results obtained by
one and the same inquirer than to the more signal differences
separating every inquirer from all the rest. The fault,
evidently, must lie deeper; not to say that the various
experimenters have themselves, in general, shown no want of
ability or readiness to note and allow for shortcomings in
mere method. Experiment, where applicable, is a very
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'. 325
powerful instrument, but, if it is to perform its decisive work,
there must first have been a close intellectual analysis of
circumstances and general conditions, and the end to which
it is to be directed must be well and clearly conceived. In
the present case, it is mostly at the prior stage of pure
psychological consideration that the fault has lain ; or rather,
it is want of prior psychological analysis that has rendered
so abortive all that experimental labour.
Here in paraphrase, with some expansion, is Mimsterberg's
final summary (p. 13) of the outcome of his predecessors'
work. The ' constant error,' which most of the inquirers
have noted in our comparison of small times, is according to
one the result of accidental circumstances, but according to
others takes the form of regular over- or under-estimation :
one maintaining that times under 3 sec. are magnified and
above 3 sec. are shortened ; another putting the dividing
point at '75 sec. ; and a third declaring that not only the
times under '75 sec. but also the comparatively larger times
over 5 sec. are magnified. When there is under-estimation,
this, according to one, attains a minimum, i.e., departs least
from the true value, at all multiples of '1 sec. (or thereby) ;
according to another, only at all odd multiples of this figure
(2'1, 3'5 sec.), the even multiples on the other hand yielding
maximum-values l ; while, according to a third, the reckoning
is least inexact at multiples of 1*25 sec. As for Weber's law,
it either, according to one, has no application to 'Time-sense';
or has absolute application, according to another ; or,
according to a third, holds for the smaller but not for greater
intervals; or finally, according to a fourth, holds for the
greater but not for the smaller. In this summary record, no
account is taken of Mr. L. T. Stevens, who in Mind, xi. 393
got, as main result of a very protracted series of experiments,
a complete reversal of that sign-value of the ' constant error '
upon which, amid all their other differences, the German
experimenters have agreed more or less ; Stevens finding
the smaller times (under '53 sec.) to be under-estimated,
and the larger (over "87 sec.) to be constantly over-estimated !
1 In his summary statement (pp. 13, 14), Miinsterberg has here, by over-
sight, put "maximum" for "minimum" and "minimum" for "maximum".
326 MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE*.
Bad as things are with the ' Time-sense,' they are not quite
so bad as this direct contradiction would make them appear.
Stevens's method of experiment, as Miinsterberg points out,
is too disparate from that of all the others to afford any
grounds for comparison of results.
Taking, then, the German results, in all their variety, by
themselves, Mtinsterberg proceeds to ask whether it can be
otherwise than that the different inquirers have unawares
brought quite different measures to the estimation of those
small times ; and this suggests the central question of all,
what it really is that they have set out to measure in the
case. A small time-interval being marked off by two limit-
ing sounds, the problem, in general, has been for the
experimenter — starting at once from the second sound, or
waiting till after a pause (commonly taken of the same
length as the given time) and then starting from a third
sound — to indicate by some kind of action when he judges
that an equal time has elapsed as between the first two
sounds. The particular means by which this is effected for
such very short intervals as can with some approach to
accuracy be thus determined are detailed at length by Wundt
(Phijs. Psych., ii.), who has done more than any other to devise
them ; they are also sufficiently explained by Miinsterberg,
who, while vindicating them from some objections that
have been charged, is able also to improve upon them for
his own use. Without attempting any description of them
here, the point to be noted is, that the ' comparison-time '
sought has to be subjectively determined, being sensibly
limited only at the beginning, whereas the given or 'normal'
time is objectively (sensibly) determined at both ends. Now
the assumption hitherto has been that the two limiting
sounds form the whole sense-content of the ' normal time,'
and that the apprehension of time-interval between them
must be set down as a direct act of consciousness, which can
be repeated with more or less exactness under the different
conditions of the 'comparison-time'. The directness or
simplicity of the conscious function in both cases has
procured it the name of ' Time-sense,' but, in reality, all
that is strictly sensible in either case are the limiting sounds.
It is here that MUnsterberg takes issue.
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'. 827
Careful introspective scrutiny of his own time-estimates
under the experimental conditions discloses for him a whole
class of factors overlooked, or hardly regarded, by previous
inquirers. These are sensations (or representations) of
muscular tension, and when looked at closely enough are
found to be of the most varied kind. As to this presently ;
but first a word on the question of principle. How without
some definite means should there be estimation of time at
all between two sound-sensations? Two pairs of similar
sounds, separated now by one now by another interval of
time, are to consciousness the same fact of sense-experience
except in so far as something else is present to differentiate
the pairs in respect of time-interval. Let this something be
(as it may be) called act of attention, since without special
attention to the time-intervals as such the experience in
each of the cases supposed would simply be of the sounds as
two. But then the attending, which makes or marks the
difference of time-interval, must consist of something-
something different in the two cases ; and what may this be
but certain feelings of muscular strain (actual or represented),
if the feelings are evidently, there and the closest observation
can detect nothing else? Sense of muscular strain, though
by itself, of course, it is not consciousness of time, may yet
be so much the main factor in such consciousness as to mark
(in its variations) the difference between this time-interval
and that. Without arguing the matter at length, Munster-
berg here takes up the position that as space-apprehension
can be shown to arise through fusion or synthesis of elements
of sensation (chiefly touch and sight) with felt muscular
activity, so also time-apprehension is explicable as another
synthesis of feelings of muscular tension with sense-elements
(by prsference sounds). No doubt, the question even as
regards space remains under debate ; but at least from those
who under Wundt's lead have done most of the experimental
work on ' Time-sense ' no objection in principle can come
to the extension of such psychogenetic consideration to time.
All depends however, for the one or the other problem,
upon the precise nature of the muscular experience to which
the (passive) sensations, so differently present in space- and
in time-perception, give occasion. Hence, for the more
328 MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE'.
special question of the means of comparative time-measure-
ment now in hand, the need of making up the account with
all that particularity that distinguishes Munsterberg's novel
introspective effort.
His experience is in many ways far from uniform, but,
except with very short intervals (put for himself under J
sec.) where nothing can be noted, the central fact is for him
always a felt process of varying muscular strain. The ex-
periment, let it be remembered, consists in the attentive
hearing of a first sound, with a second expected presently ;
upon the hearing of which — in the simpler case where no
pause intervenes (to be closed by a third sound) — the sub-
jective estimate of ' comparison-time ' has to go forward
without other condition supplied There is actual strain in
the hearing of the first sound ; and this being taken, in the
circumstances, as signal of another sound to follow, there is
next representation of strain in expectancy of the second
sound, with actual strain again when this comes to be heard;
whereupon representation must do all the rest. Now what
Miinsterberg finds is, that the varying strain, actual or
represented, fills up and is all there is to fill up his conscious-
ness in connexion with the limiting sounds. The sounds
themselves have no appreciable after-images and thus are no
more than limits. As for the muscular tension, it appears to
him to vary in the way of waning from the initial height to
zero and of then waxing (in representation). But he observes
that this twofold process, when occupying the foreground of
consciousness, appears to undergo a certain retardation —
with the obvious result of enabling it (in the experimental
case) to fill up somewhat longer intervals than it else,
naturally, would. For the rest, when the interval is not too
great to be within the compass of any possible drawing-out
of the whole process, he finds that now one now another
combination of the two stages (of waning and waxing) may
be employed to span it. All that is necessary is, that what-
ever combination served to fill up the given ' normal time '
be reproduced (in imagination) as exactly as may be for the
4 comparison-time ' that has to be equated.
So far the general scheme ; but, to understand how the
strains can have their waning and waxing thus variously
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE*. 329
combined, note must be taken of the precise muscular acts
involved. While it is matter of common experience how
directly sounds, beyond all other sensations, pass over into
movement of limbs, it is rather in action of head, neck and
shoulders, with related parts, that the attentive attitude of
listening consists, joined, of course, with tension of the
muscles inside the ear itself. But, .in watching himself when
on the strain to get a measure of time-interval, Munsterberg
is most of all struck with the part played by the great perio-
dic function of breathing. So massive as this is in its
alternating -rhythm of inspiration and expiration, he finds it
cannot proceed in either phase without modifying the state
of tension in which the connected muscular parts happen to
be. If the strain of attentive hearing is in process of being
relaxed, the waning is helped by expiration ; on the other
hand, the gathering tension of expectancy comes to a head
the more readily as the breath is drawn in. The effect of
either kind, he gives reason for supposing, is wrought through
the special nerve-centre of respiration ; but, however this
may be, the breath-rhythm is, in his experience, so dominant
a factor in all attempts at experimental estimation of time
that the fact of its having been overlooked by previous
investigators is, for him, enough to render all their results
of no account. If it so inevitably and powerfully affects
the varying strain of the attentive attitude, the very first
thing to be considered would seem to be the precise stage of
the breathing-process from which the experimental reckon-
ing begins to be made. But its part in the work of time-
estimation does not stop there. In the case of relatively
longer intervals — that is to say, such as are beyond the
span, however drawn out, of the twofold process of waning
and waxing tension directly involved in the listening attitude
— the breathing-rhythm may itself become the chief, if not
the only, means of time-measurement. In that case, Munster-
berg finds it subject to a variety of modifications. First, the
respiratory act appears to him, like other muscular tensions,
to get drawn out when consciously attended to ; thus acquir-
ing more span or measuring-power within the single period.
Then, while normally there is a pause between the end of
expiration and the beginning of inspiration (amounting to
330 MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE* AND 'TIME-SENSE'.
about a third of the whole breathing-period), he observes
that this is apt, in the experimental attitude, to drop out ;
with the result that the function, become thus continuous,
gains increased efficiency for measurement. Again, he notes
himself as at times actively forcing both inspiration and
expiration (the latter of which, in normal circumstances, is
left to simple elasticity of lung), thus making several short
respirations within the regular period of one ; the accommo-
dation being obviously directed to the procurement of uni-
formity of breathing-phase between the two time-intervals.
And, once more, in the case of such times as surpass the
possible duration of the most protracted single act of
respiration, he remarks the tendency to keep up a. certain
convenient rhythm of breathing, which, though it never
passes into the form of numerical calculation, gives the most
effective means of comparative estimate.
After such careful reckoning with his experience under
the special conditions, Miinsterberg proceeds to argue that
the variety of our common judgments of the lapse of time
depends, no less than in the experimental case, upon the
degree to which expectant strain (ultimately muscular) is
present with the impressions of any kind that are being
received; and, again, that the facts of time-memory, even
when this illusorily reverses the original judgment, in no
way conflict with the view he has obtained of the actual
factors involved in time-measurement. Next, by close
examination of what is expressed or implied in the records of
previous experiments, he is led to the conclusion that the
true reason of the marked discrepancy of numerical results
is to be sought in their authors' disregard of the precise
factors involved, more especially the all-dominating breath-
rhythm. If the periodicity of some kind noted by all the
Leipsic experimenters in their time-estimation points to
the implication of such a periodic factor as the respiratory
function, then obviously the (overlooked) differences of
breathing-phase in which by constitutional habit or by
chance they made their estimates may well account for their
discrepant figures. Both arguments — too pertinent to the
matter in hand to be fairly called digressions — are very
acutely, and more than plausibly, worked out by Miinsterberg.
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE*. 331
But, attention having been thus drawn to one of the most
interesting parts of his whole memoir (pp. 43-54), it is of
more urgency here not to omit following him into the con-
cluding section (pp. 54-68) where the results of his subjective
analysis are brought to the test of experiment.
It is but a small part of the whole mass of time-experi-
ments he has made that Mtinsterberg cares to give even the
most summary account of. Following in general the Leip-
sic manner of experiment at its highest development, but
improving upon it by reduction of the amount of motor
reaction called for in the estimator (an important matter in
such delicate work), and by having the 'comparison-time'
closed as well as begun, like the ' normal time,' with sound
of hammer-stroke (thus equalising the conditions of expect-
ancy as never before), he made a very large number of trials
with another person as estimator, on the line of the earlier
experiments, going up from 1 to 5 sec. intervals, by £ sec.
steps. All these he leaves aside, as of no more real value
than the Leipsic results ; any periodic law that could be got
out of the figures having no validity so long as the determin-
ing factors in the estimator's consciousness are not accurately
assigned. He gives instead, in compendious form, only the
results of some other series of experiments with himself as
estimator ; an assistant being employed to fix the intervals
for which equation was sought. These were advisedly taken
of a length, from 6 to 60 sec., such that the subjective con-
ditions could be marked with some certainty.
In the first series, the ' comparison-time ' was estimated-
without pause on completion of the ' normal time ' propounded,
but under these different circumstances. (1) It was left to
the assistant to propound intervals in pell-mell order (e.g.,
15, 7, 22, 18, 24 ... sec.) without reference to Mimster-
berg's breathing, who in turn made his comparative estimate
without altering in any way the regularity of its natural
rhythm. (2) The assistant was required to keep close watch
and propound only such intervals (though again in pell-mell
order and without too violent contrasts, e.g., 11'5, 14, 7'2,
16 4, 21*6 . . . sec.) as should make Miinsterberg begin his
estimate at precisely the same stage of the whole breathing-
process as he was in at beginning of the given ' normal time '.
332 MUNSTERBERG ON ' MUSCULAR SENSE ' AND ' TIME-SENSE '.
No ' constant error ' (i.e., of over-estimation or under-esti-
mation) appearing after many trials, all the errors, in per-
centage relatively to the ' normal time,' were put together
for (1) and (2) separately ; and, then calculating out the mean
error, Miinsterberg found this to be as much as 10' 7 per
cent, for (1) and as little as 2'9 for (2). A very marked
difference, truly.
In a second double set of experiments, the same difference
of circumstances was repeated, except that the estimate had
.now to be made after a pause varying from 1 to 60 sec. ;
that is to say, instead of using the second stroke, which
closed the ' normal time,' as initial limit of the ' comparison-
time,' this was given by a third stroke. Here (1), where no
regard was had to breathing-rhythm, the mean error rose
(from 10'7) to 24 per cent. ; but (2), where care was taken to
have the comparative estimate begun, as far as possible, at
the same respiratory stage with the ' normal time,' the mean
error rose (from 2'9) only to 5'3 per cent. A not less re-
markable result.
In face of these figures, if they are even approximately
confirmed by other experimenters, it seems impossible to
doubt that breathing has a prerogative position among the
sense-factors concerned in the estimation of short time-inter-
vals ; and it is much to be hoped that the whole subject will
be taken up again, at Leipsic or elsewhere, with express
reference to Miinsterberg's path-breaking analysis or at least
not without similar attempt at prior determination of the
precise content of the time-experience which it is sought to
measure. But, in itself, breathing is of course only one
among other muscular factors involved, and the general
outcome of the novel research, so far as yet carried, is to
bring impressively into view the import of muscular activity
for psychological explanation. A subsidiary series of experi-
ments, too slightly indicated, goes some way to supplying
the confirmation that comes by negative instance. Miinster-
berg tried time-comparison by means of a set of voluntary
tensions and relaxations (not said what) slowly carried out
so as to be independent of the breathing-rhythm ; and here
the estimate was still .good and sure. But when he pro-
ceeded to estimate for intervals between 3 and 10 sec. with-
MUNSTERBERG ON 'MUSCULAR SENSE' AND 'TIME-SENSE'. 333
out regard to (felt) tensions of any kind, not all his foregone
practice in time-comparison was of any avail to save him
from such arbitrary ' shots ' as taking 12 sec. to be equal to
4 or, again, 3 to 9. If the facts were so, their significance
seems greater than Miinsterberg cares to claim against the
possible objection that among the subjective data disregarded
may have been the very ' Time-sense ' whose existence is in
question. The objection cannot well be urged, since the
supposed ' Time-sense,' taken to be a direct activity of pure
consciousness, cannot properly be expressed in terms of the
(felt) muscular tensions and relaxations of the experiment.
What Miinsterberg may in any case be fairly credited with
having accomplished, is to bring the conscious activity of
time-estimation into relation, hardly before suspected, with a
definite basis of sense-experience. The name ' Time-sense '
thus has more justification than it ever got from its inventors,
for whom it has marked only the apparent immediacy of
time-apprehension. But yet, as we do not properly speak
of a ' Space-sense ' except to indicate that there are sensory
elements necessarily involved in all space-apprehension, so
should it be also with ' Time-sense,' whenever the psycho-
logical account is finally made up of which he has here done
a good deal more than give the first sketch. The memoir,
as a whole, seems to me at once so interesting and im-
portant that I have preferred to use the available space for
a somewhat full summary of it, rather than for critical
remark. Question might be raised at a good many points.
For example, it is not clear how the author can psycho-
physically interpret the act (on which he lays stress) of
attending to the waning and waxing of the muscular ten-
sions which are for him the means of attending to the
limiting sounds of the experiment. But whatever other
difficulties might be noted in the research, whether of
principle or detail, they leave untouched its character of rare
suggestiveness.
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA.1
IN a volume recently published under the above title 2 the
editor of the Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophic has
brought his great erudition, as well as philosophic insight,
to bear upon a long and much-debated question, and has
succeeded in giving to it at last something like a definitive
solution. What did Leibniz, who stood forth in the end as
the only possible victor of Spinoza, himself owe to the
decried Jewish thinker? The question has the more interest
because, while Leibniz through all his later years helped not
a little to swell the general chorus of reprobation, his own
monadology has yet seemed to many to work out into a
pantheism as decided as Spinoza's. Be this as it may,
Prof. Stein has seen the need, and also the opportunity, of
taking up the question anew, in a fashion not possible before.
Gerhardt's collected edition of Leibniz's philosophical works,
which has been in progress since 1875,3 affords for the first
time the means of tracking, with an approach to continuity,
the all-inquiring man throughout the devious course of his
mental development. Where Gerhardt comes short in
completeness, or sometimes correctness of chronological
presentation, his untiring labours have yet rendered it
comparatively easy for others, like Prof. Stein in the present
1 Mind, xvi. 443.
2 Leibniz u. Spinoza. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der
Leibnizischen Philosophic. Von Prof. Dr. LUDWIG STEIN. Mit neunzehn
Ineditis aus dem Nachlass von Leibniz. Berlin : G. Reiiner, 1890. Pp.
xvii., 362. (See Mind, No. 62, p. 298.)
3 Completed last year with a supplementary (seventh) volume. This
includes, with a large variety of new matter, pieces which were noted in
Mind, xiii. 312 (see above, " Leibniz and Hobbes ") as absent from the six
volumes to which the edition was originally to be confined. Unfortun-
ately, Gerhardt has not supplied the General Index which would have so
greatly enhanced the value of his devoted labours. And, apart from
Index, a little more practical sense in the matter of headings to pages,
&c., would have made reference to the handsome volumes far easier than,
to one's sad experience, it now is.
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA. 335
volume, to supply the deficiency by independent search in
the Leibniz archives at Hanover. The new task, then, was
to take all the discoverable facts of personal relation between
Leibniz and Spinoza, and interpret them in the light of
what can now be more exactly made out as to Leibniz's
intellectual history earlier and later. It was first essayed
by Prof. Stein in a Berlin Academy memoir of 1888, and is
now achieved with a circumspection and thoroughness that
leave hardly anything to be desired. The result is, that we
have not only a settlement, which maybe taken as practically
final, of the Spinoza-question, but also a more coherent and
satisfactory view of the development of Leibniz's monado^
logical thought than had yet been furnished of that difficult
problem — for all the labour and ingenuity that have been so
long bestowed upon it.
It has now for some time back been generally recognised
that Leibniz (b. 1646), though already committed to the
philosophic life in his teens, had reached his fiftieth year be-
fore he was known publicly to have worked out a new meta-
physical doctrine of his own. The publication was by way
of two short memoirs in 1695 — the Specimen Dynamicum, of
more specially scientific import, and the better-known philo-
sophical essay, Systeme nouveau de la Nature. E-ven then
he had not lit upon his distinctive watchword of ' Pre-estab-
lished Harmony ' (in that precise form), to express the
universal intercommunion of substances ; the phrase occur-
ring to him only some months later in the course of sequent
controversy. Nor did he adopt his no less distinctive
' Monad,' to express the individuality of each and every sub-
stance, till the following year ; borrowing it most probably,
as Prof. Stein now gives new ground for supposing, from
the younger v. Helmont. But the more important and
interesting question is, when he had first attained the
essential points of his new doctrine of substance. Now as
to this it can, with Prof. Stein, hardly be doubted any more
that it was by the year 1686, when he wrote the untitled
essay (Gerhardt, iv. 427-63, first published by Grotefend in
1846) which he himself speaks of as " un petit discours de
metaphysique " in sending at that time an abstract of it to
Arnauld (Gerhardt, ii. 11-13). Much lay here undeveloped,
836 LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA.
which only gradually dawned on him in the course of the
correspondence with Arnauld that followed (till 1690). But
the central conception of a system of individualised substances
is already there ; whereas of this there is no trace in the
next-earlier writing, published in 1684, the well-known
Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis. It is surprising
that this epistemological tract, in which Leibniz, pursuing
his long polemic with Descartes, sought to give much-needed
precision to the Cartesian criterion of truth, should ever have
been regarded as giving the first indication of his own new
doctrine of substance. But, in this default, how are we then
to construe the actual course of his mental history up to
1686, the date from which onwards the progressive develop-
ment of his monadological theory, in all its articulation, can
now be accurately traced ? Here it is — for the years before
1686 — that Prof. Stein succeeds in bringing clearly into view
a series of determining factors hardly suspected, or at least
not at all definitely enough conceived, before ; and these
factors all have relation to a demonstrable influence, deep as
well as prolonged, from Spinoza.
The main positions are these : — thai, after a youth of
general philosophical interest and varied aspirations, followed
by a time (from 1672) of fruitful mathematical study and
discovery, Leibniz was brought, by serious occupation with
Descartes towards 1675, to such a state of mind that he was
fain to turn for help to Spinoza ; that from 1676 his attitude
to Spinoza can be described as nothing short of friendly,
even after he had made close study of the Ethica from the
beginning of 1678, revolting in this only from Spinoza's
denial of final cause in things ; that, in the revulsion, his
native concern for teleology was intensified by study of Plato,
and before long the definite religious purpose of all his later
thought became fixed ; that, in particular, he was helped by
Plato, towards 1680, to a conception of substance as active
force, whereby he could look to reconcile the new mechanical
philosophy of the seventeenth century with final cause in
nature ; that later on, from about 1684, he came with Aristotle
(in more or less Scholastic guise) to see the individual char-
acter of his substantialised forces ; that thus from 1686, when
he wrote his unpublished Discours de Metaphysique (in order,
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA. 337
apparently, to define his philosophical position against the
persistent attempts made to win him over to the Catholic
faith), he had at last taken his ground, not again to be
changed though with much in it still to be developed ;
finally, that it was only from this time forward that he began
to adopt the hostile tone towards Spinoza that, with some
rare and significant exceptions, marks the references of all
his later years.
It is impossible here to follow out, even in the most
general manner, the evidence (some of it quite new) and the
acutely reasoned combinations by which Prof. Stein supports
these positions ; but some more particular account may be
taken of the different stages now demonstrable in the rela-
tions with Spinoza. Curious it is, to begin with, that in the
earliest years Leibniz couples with the name of Hobbes and
other modern philosophers the name of the "Cartesian"
Spinoza as readily as that of Descartes himself, though
Spinoza was then known only by his more or less free ex-
position of Descartes' Principia. We know that Descartes
was not seriously taken in hand by Leibniz till some time
(probably rather late) in the course of the years, 1672-76, that
he spent in Paris ; and the delay is remarkable and unex-
plained, when some years before he had come into as close
contact with Descartes' doctrine as he must have been
brought by the exposition of Spinoza (1663) or of other
Cartesians whom he mentions. But that in Spinoza, at all
events, the interest of the eager learner was keen from the
first is sufficiently proved by the citations which Prof. Stein
makes. It may be doubted, only, whether he does not go
too far, at p. 38, when he ascribes to Spinoza's rather than
to Hobbes's influence the declaration of Leibniz in 1671,
that he regarded geometry as preparing the way for the
philosophy of motion or body and this for the science of
mind. A more pointed reference to the succession of stages
in Hobbes's philosophic thought there could hardly be.
And, generally, it may be said that, the more closely one
scans all those earlier utterances of Leibniz, including the
two academic memoirs on Motion of 1671, the more evi-
dently it appears that, until he became engaged in serious
mathematical work from 1672, it was by Hobbes, of all
22
338 LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA.
modern thinkers, that he was first and most powerfully
affected. Hobbes, as Dr. F. Tonnies has shown, gave him
probably the first dim suggestion of the monadic notion, that
was to lie undeveloped for so many years ; and perhaps also
first made him dream that he could not have worthier life-
task than to reconcile the new mechanical doctrines with
those interests of religion which had been safeguarded by
earlier philosophy. It ought, however, to be added that, if
not just at the point here remarked on, Prof. Stein is in
general most forward to recognise the influence of Hobbes
upon Leibniz.
The second stage is of direct personal relation. Even in
the earlier years, it is now known, there had been more cor-
respondence between Leibniz and Spinoza than is repre-
sented by the single interchange of letters (on a point of
optics) given in the Opp. Posthuma ; but nothing more
passed till after 1675, when Leibniz, having now added a
first-hand study of Descartes' philosophy to his mathematical
achievements, had his interest in Spinoza renewed and
heightened by association (at Paris) with Tschirnhausen,
who belonged to the inner Spinozistic circle. It is at this
stage and what follows on it that Prof. Stein throws most
new light. However little one can imagine Leibniz losing
hold of his original philosophic ideas and purposes, all vague
as they were, it is now certain that, in 1675-76, he was still
so far from seeing his own later way that he was, above all,
anxious to seek from Spinoza the help which he had failed
to obtain from Descartes. This appears first from Tschirn-
hausen's recommendation, expressed through Schuller to
Spinoza (November, 1675), that Leibniz should be taken
into confidence ; and, when Spinoza would not straightway
admit him to sight of the imprinted Ethica, we have now
evidence that in 1676 Leibniz never rested until he stood
face to face with the Hague recluse. That the two met has
always been known from an incidental remark of Leibniz in
the Theodicee (iii. 376) ; and that their conversation was not,
as there suggested, confined to " anecdotes on the affairs of
the time," but extended at least to the Cartesian laws of
motion, has also been known, since 1854, from a note, in
Leibniz's hand, published by Foucher de Careil. But it is
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA. 339
only now, through Prof. Stein's careful research, that we
know how serious was their intercourse and how eagerly it
was sought by the younger thinker. When Leibniz, in the
autumn of 1676, finally left Paris, to take up the official post
at Hanover to which he had been appointed some months
before, he made his second visit to England and thence took
Holland on his way to Germany. But, whereas he was con-
tent with a single week on this side of the Channel, in Hol-
land he first spent four weeks at Amsterdam in the company
of G-. H. Schuller, a medical friend of Spinoza, and, having
all the time been closely engaged in commenting every scrap
of Spinoza's writing which he could get out of Schuller, was
then at last (in November) admitted to the presence of the
master at the Hague. And here there is proof, set out at
length by Prof. Stein with the supporting documents, that
their conversations were frequent and intimate ; ranging
over a large variety of philosophical topics, and so convincing
the shy Spinoza of his visitor's earnestness of purpose as
well as ability that he produced for him the carefully-guarded
MS. of the Ethica, and (apparently) allowed a copy to be
taken away of the initial definitions, axioms and proposi-
tions.
What then was the outcome of their meeting ? Before
three months had passed Spinoza was no more ; and some
months later the Opp. Posthuma appeared — from the hand
(as Prof. Stein first proved the other year) of Schuller, with
whom Leibniz at Hanover remained in busy correspondence.
Prof. Stein now puts in print all the more important of
Schuller's letters to Leibniz (preserved at Hanover). From
these, even without Leibniz's letters (except copies of three)
which called them forth, it is evident how eagerly interested
he was in everything that could throw light on the as yet
unpublished doctrine of the Ethica. He is seen, too, when
the posthumous volume came at last to hand in January,
1678, throwing himself into the study of it with the utmost
ardour. Various sets of critical notes which he at once or
upon more careful reading wrote down are extant, and have
seen the light at different times within the last half -century.
They betray, in general, as little want of sympathy with
some of Spinoza's most characteristic positions as with his
340 LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA.
method of philosophical demonstration. Only when Spinoza
comes to deny intellect and will to God as natura naturans
and to deride the search for final causes does Leibniz feel
bound to mark emphatic dissent. There we see him, evi-
dently, touched to the quick in his innermost and earliest
convictions. With his singular openness of mind, especially
in those unsettled years, he could give to Tschirnhausen and
to Spinoza himself the impression that he was free from
religious pre-occupation ; and, as now appears from a re-
markable letter and epigram discovered by Prof. Stein, he
could even sympathise with the tone of Spinoza's stern re-
proof to the confessional presumption of the whilom pupil,
Albert de Burgh. But that he had not lost the aspirations
(vague enough) of his youth, towards a philosophical irenicon
in the interest of religion, is manifest in his prompt rejection
of just those conclusions of Spinoza that were at variance
with any religion that the world understood. Though Prof.
Stein takes Leibniz's original differences with Descartes to
have been purely theoretic, there seems good ground for
thinking that, from the time when he first really mastered
the Cartesian doctrine, a distrust of its practical consequences
helped to stimulate his hostility to its principles. It may
well then have been an anxious curiosity to see how far
Spinoza, by more rigid method or otherwise, had been able
to escape the dreaded consequences, that drew him to the
Hague. And there finding that the dying man, full like
himself of high practical purpose, agreed with him in reject-
ing Descartes' theory of body and motion, he may for a
time have had some real hope that philosophic salvation
lay in the way of the mysteriously guarded EtTiica. The
awakening came soon and decisively enough. But that he
did not at once — or indeed for some considerable time
afterwards — pass out of the mood of sympathetic apprecia-
tion is what Prof. Stein has made abundantly clear by all
the evidence, new or old, which he here marshals with
admirable force. Nor is it countervailed by the fact that in
those same years Leibniz could already assume with ortho-
dox correspondents something of his later tone in reference
to the hardy Jew. His own formal allowance in 1704 at the
beginning of the Nouveaux Essais — where Theophile says :
LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA. 34]
— " Vous savez que j'etois alle un peu trop loin autre fois, et
que je commen9ois a pencher du cote des Spinosistes qui ne
laissent qu'une puissance infinie a Dieu " — of itself justifies
the inference, which is all that Prof. Stein seeks to draw
from the facts as now known, that the years 1676-9, in
Leibniz's mental history, may well be called " a period
friendly to Spinoza".
The influence from Spinoza, of course, did not end with
the extinction of Leibniz's hopes. It was, in a sense, never
more effective than when the fully-disclosed doctrine of the
Ethica threw him back upon the thought of antiquity. If
Spinoza, at last, stood declared as the ruthless logician who
was not afraid to draw out the extremest consequences of
Descartes' mechanical principles, was the correction not to
be sought outside of the modern movement altogether?
Leibniz's boyish acquaintance with the Greek fountainheads
of the traditional philosophy had, as regards Plato, been
turned to some extent into direct knowledge by 1676, when
he translated the two representative dialogues, Phcedo and
Theaetetus. In manifest reaction then from the thorough-
going naturalism of Spinoza, he is seen, from 1679, almost at
a loss to find words that shall express to his correspondents
his veneration for the "holy" Plato, especially when main-
taining (in the Phcedo) the supremacy of final causation for
any true understanding of nature. Again, to the year 1680
(as Gerhardt, in a special memoir, has shown) is to be re-
ferred the short tract entitled by Erdmann De Vera Methodo
Philosophic?' et Theologies, with its identification of the
notions of substance and activity ; and that Plato's doctrine
of ideas gave the suggestion here to the first definite step in
the line of development of the monadic conception is rendered
very probable by Prof. Stein's careful argument. Still more
effectively does he show that the second great step did not
begin to be taken till some four years later, and was then
taken under the influence of Aristotle, who from that time
overshadows Plato in the mind of the eager thinker now
pressing onward to a goal of his own that he has begun dis-
tinctly to descry. But while his Plato had sometimes been
little more than the Plato of Augustin, his Aristotle appears
to have been mainly the Aristotle of the Schoolmen and
342 LEIBNIZ AND SPINOZA.
foremost among these of Aquinas. The point, in both cases,
is of interest, because it shows him, first of all, concerned to
get his thinking into a relation of harmony with the chief
religious authorities of Christendom ; but, once he had sat-
isfied himself of this — himself, rather than Arnauld, to whom
first he sought to communicate his ideas in 1686 —he had no
hesitation in proceeding to develop these further with all the
freedom of conscious power and proved scientific ability.
The truth is that, though Leibniz had a singularly open in-
tellect and was always (not only now but even in later age)
looking about for suggestions of thought from without, it
was nothing more than suggestions that such a mind as his
could put up with. The working-out, the combining and
reconciling, — these were all his own. It can, however, be
shown, as here by Prof. Stein, that not only his central
conception of individualised substance, but also that his
working-principle of continuity, was developed under Scho-
lastic influence. For years still to come — till he adopted
(and adapted) the name ' Monad ' — it was Scholastic terms,
like 'entelechies,' 'formes substantielles,' and the like, that
served his purpose in opposing the hierarchy of active and
self-realising substances, each in its degree endowed with
a true perceptivity, to every form of the modern doctrine of
pure mechanicism — and specially Spinoza's.
With these remarks, the reader interested in Leibniz — as
what student of the history of philosophy cannot but be ? —
must be sent to Prof. Stein's pages for -the detailed proof of
the novel positions that have here been little more than
barely indicated. He will not only find them argued out
with a rare circumspectness, but also within the volume will
meet with many other unexpected suggestions of no small
interest. To mention but one instance : new documentary
evidence is here brought to light which throws back the
original conception of the Theodicee some fifteen or more
years from the time of its publication in 1710, and thereby
helps to explain the little coherence of its parts (all rather
poorly written), and the want of relation which even the
latest of them shows to Leibniz's characteristic philosophical
ideas, though penned long after these had reached their full
development.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BKAIN.1
IN this eagerly looked for work Dr. Ferrier gives a system-
atic exposition of his own experiments on the functions of
the brain, with a critical digest of the results of inquiry into
the cerebro-spinal system generally. Struck, as every one
must be, with the discrepancy and even glaring contradiction
among the results obtained by different inquirers, he yet
contends that by carefully directed experiments on animals
the foundations of a sure knowledge of the brain-functions
can be laid. Accordingly, though he allows that much still
remains to be done, he does not hesitate to put forward a
body of results, original and collated, which are by no means
wanting in definiteness.
The book as a whole cannot but enhance Dr. Ferrier's
reputation as an investigator of remarkable acuteness and
power. While following with great pertinacity his own
very engrossing line of inquiry, he has managed to keep his
eye upon the work of contemporary investigators at home
and abroad, at least such as bears most directly upon his
own. He has, moreover, by intelligent psychological study,
fitted himself to probe questions which the most accomplished
physiologists that are nothing more are apt to pass by or
misunderstand. His physiological results have been obtained
with great skill, and, whatever may be said against his
interpretations, they are at once clearly conceived and for-
cibly argued. It is little to say of both that they must
henceforth be reckoned with, by psychologists as well as
physiologists, for any doctrine of brain in relation to mind.
The first three chapters, dealing with the structure of the
brain and spinal cord and the functions of the cord and
medulla oblongata, contain nothing particularly new, and
may be passed over with the single remark that the author
1 By David Ferrier. M.D., F.E.S. London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1876.
(Mind, ii. 92.)
344 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
by decisively rejecting the notion that up to the medulla
there is anything but " non-sentient, non-intelligent, reflex
mechanism," enables the reader to anticipate with some pro-
bability his view of the working of higher centres short of
the highest. He does, in fact, as the occasion arises, con-
clude of each higher centre in succession that there is no
evidence of its action having a subjective phase till we come
to the cortical substance of the brain itself, where the sub-
jective concomitant seems too apparently present for any
argument to be thought needful. It should, however, be
noted that in his arguments he takes little or no account of
the view that there are unconscious and semi-conscious
states that may still be called mental or subjective, and are
presumed to be in relation with the neural processes of lower
centres. In so doing he might, doubtless, plead the example
of not a few psychologists ; still one could wish that a view
which has received not a little support from physiologists
had been considered by the way.
When he reaches the mesencephalon (corpora quadrige-
mina with pons) and cerebellum, Dr. Ferrier is first called
to compare the varied researches of others with original (not
merely testing) experiments of his own. The centres just
named are in relation not only with the multitude of efferent
nerves ending under the skin or in deeper-seated parts, but
also with the visual and auditory nerves of special sense :
and there is given (in ch. iv.) a very careful and distinct
account of the variety of impressions that are received and
transformed into complicated motor impulses after removal
of the cerebrum in animals. It is true that, as the grade of
animal life is higher, the action of the lower centres is less
independent, and the disturbance of their function on re-
moval of the hemispheres is greater. Still the evidence
forthcoming from experiments on animals, supported as
they are by clinical observations on man, leaves little doubt
that the mesencephalon and cerebellum are specially involved
in the three great motor functions of equilibration, co-ordi-
nation of locomotion and instinctive expression of feeling.
Dr. Ferrier's own experiments, by electrical irritation of the
optic lobes in animals, seem to establish that the corpora
quadrigemina (with the pons) are concerned in all these
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 345
functions, but more especially the last two. The cerebellum,
by the same means, appears as the great centre of equilibra-
tion, dependent as this function is on the reception of ex-
tremely varied impressions, tactile, visual and auditory (from
the semi-circular canals). At the same time, the cerebellum
is not so exclusively possessed of this function as that the
cerebral hemispheres do not participate in it, and thus
equilibration may be maintained in spite of cerebellar decay,
especially when this is gradual. There is no evidence (any
more than for still lower centres) that the cerebellum, great
and developed as the organ is, has for itself aught to do with
conscious sensation or voluntary motion. Neither has it
any relation (as was supposed) to the sexual function.
Passing now to the cerebral hemispheres, the treatment of
which occupies two-thirds of the whole work, Dr. Ferrier
first explains the methods which, as practised by Hitzig and
himself, may be said to have opened a new era in the history
of brain-investigations. He sufficiently justifies his own
method of faradisation by the side of Hitzig's galvanisation,
and then defends their joint conclusions against the objec-
tions urged by various later experimenters. The defence is
too perfunctory considering the eminence of some of the
objectors, Hermann not being noticed at all and Dr. Burdon
Sanderson being only partially met ; and this is the more to
be regretted, because the original position is one for which
not a little can be said. When it is uniformly found that
electrical stimulation of contiguous small areas of the cortical
substance results in perfectly distinct movements of limbs,
&c., it seems impossible to doubt that the areas (or some of
them — more exactly determined by a supplementary process)
are quite specially concerned in the actuation of the move-
ments; and they may not improperly be called motor centres,
as the ultimate seats whence the different motor impulses
proceed, if none higher can be assigned in the whole nervous
system and it is not denied that centrifugal fibres conduct
downwards from them to lower centres, and so to the
muscles. It is the fact, too, as Dr. Ferrier does not fail to
urge, that such an interpretation of the experimental pheno-
mena only bears out. the clinical conclusions previously
forced upon Dr. Hughlings Jackson in his protracted study
346 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
of localised convulsive movements in man. We need have
no hesitation, then, at least in taking the experiments as a
clue to the resolution of the functions of aH organ which else
in its complexity quite baffles scientific analysis, and may
now proceed to see how far Dr. Ferrier's methods carry
him.
He first offers a simple record of the results of electrical
irritation applied to the hemispheres and to the basal ganglia
(corpora striata and optic thalamij in a great variety of
animals from monkeys to frogs and fishes. The irritation,
it is now well known, as applied at different parts, more or
less definitely limited in each animal and homologous in the
various kinds, results in movements special or general, or in
nothing at all that is manifest. Then arises the question of
interpretation. Movements, as Dr. Ferrier says, " may be
the result of some conscious modification incapable of being
expressed in physiological terms, or they may be reflex, or
they may be truly motor in the sense of being caused by ex-
citation of a region in direct connexion with the motor parts
of the crus cerebri ". To decide then, in each case, what is the
real character of the movements determined from excitable
areas, or to judge what may be the function of the regions
that are not excitable, other experimental light is wanted.
Dr. Ferrier accordingly resorts next to localised extirpation
(chiefly by cautery), and in order to have results, as nearly as
maybe, applicable to the human brain, he operates chiefly on
monkeys with brains approximating to the human type.
He finds, then, from both processes together, that while
there is a region that may be described generally as bounding
the fissure of Rolando (more particularly the ascending
frontal and parietal convolutions with the postero-parietal
lobule), the destruction of which causes complete motor par-
alysis of the other side of the body without loss of sensation,
there are other regions the destruction of which causes loss
of sensation without affecting the powers of movement. These
latter areas, or sensory centres as Dr. Ferrier calls them, lie
for sight and .hearing (angular gyrus and temporo-sphenoidal
convolution respectively) just behind the great motor region;
for taste and smell (apparently together at the base of the
temporo-sphenoidal lobe) below the others ; and for touch
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 347
(hippocampal region) on the inferior convoluted surface
where it turns inwards. The " sensory centres " with the
more forward "motor centres" occupy the whole median
region of the brain, corresponding with the areas excitable
under electrisation. Behind are the occipital lobes bound-
ing the hemispheres backwards, and these yield no positive
result upon stimulation, but destruction of them appears to
Dr. Ferrier to involve the loss of organic or systemic sensi-
bility. On the other hand the extreme frontal convolutions,
which also are not excitable by electrical stimulation, appear
when destroyed to carry with them the power of attentive
and intelligent observation or the controlling functions of
intelligence. As for the basal ganglia, the optic thalami
prove to contain the upward paths of sensory impressions,
and the corpora striata the downward paths of motor im-
pulses ; and the two are so connected as to have a certain
independent action, apart from the hemispheres, especially
in animals lower than the monkey ; but they are in no case
sensory and motor centres like the convolutions.
In this summary statement, which seeks to bring together
the salient points of Dr. Ferrier's view of the different parts
of the brain, it is the doctrine of definite sensory (and motor)
centres that most calls for remark. His view of the basal
ganglia needs to be strengthened by further research, ana-
tomical and physiological, though it seems not improbable,
founded as it is on original experiments and acute criticism
of extant results. As regards the functions of the occipital
and frontal lobes, his views require much more elaboration
before their psychological import can be seriously estimated:
indeed he does little more than throw out a suggestion as to
the occipital lobes, one too that is contradicted, or at least
not supported, in a striking instance to which he very fairly
gives prominence ; while his supposition as to the working
of the frontal lobes has none of the precision that marks the
corresponding doctrine of Attention (to which he refers) ad-
vanced in Wundt's Physiologische Psychologic. But there
is certainly no want of definiteness in his assertions respect-
ing the sensory and motor centres lying between the two
uncertain regions. Neither, it must be said, is his method
of procedure in determining which of the excitable areas are
348 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
properly motor, and which are only indirectly motor (thence,
by inference, sensory), at all wanting in circumspectness.
If it is the case that the motor powers remain intact when
any part of the brain except a certain region is destroyed,
and that they vanish when this region is destroyed and this
only ; again, within this region, that particular movements
are maintained or lost as certain definite areas and these
only are left intact or destroyed ; while, once more, direct
electrical stimulation of the same region and its included
areas results always in the very movements, general and
special, that are lost by their destruction ; — one does not see
how the conclusion is to be avoided that this region and the
areas within it are the true centres whence movements
generally and the particular included movements are, as
movements, originated. What meaning is there else in the
notion of ' centre ' applied to the brain, when (as before said)
there is nothing higher upon which the cortical substance
is dependent ? Take now a particular area lying just behind.
Let it be found that stimulation of this results in certain
movements involved in the normal working of a particular
organ of sense — say the ear. Let it then be found that,
this area and this area only being destroyed, complete deaf-
ness ensues, but the animal retains all its other senses and
its powers of movement unimpaired. Again the conclusion
is inevitable that here is a part of the brain which is, to say
the least, involved in the sense of hearing as no other part
can be, and which may even, with some show of propriety »
be called a centre for hearing because there is no higher seat
in the cortical substance to which the sound-impressions are
carried as they are carried to this one. Of course it should
only be after a most varied series of experiments that any
scientific mind could dream of making such an exclusive
statement, the circumstances that have to be eliminated
being extremely perplexing, whether as arising from the fact
that there are two hemispheres with a supplementary if not
compensatory action in each as regards the other, or from
the fact that presence or absence of sensation can after all
only be inferred from motor reactions as present or absent.
But a candid reader will hardly deny to Dr. Ferrier the
credit of having been fully aware of the experimental diffi-
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 349
culties, and of having at once honestly and skilfully faced
them. What then is to be made of his assertions '? Does
he prove his case either at all or in the sense for which he
contends ?
The very definiteness of the view — that extreme sim-
plicity which will make its fortune — is in truth what most
arouses suspicion. Not only do other inquirers find direct
experimental evidence that the cerebral functions are in-
volved with one another over the hemispheres in the most
intricate fashion, but it also seems clear on a variety of
grounds that the brain cannot be the simple aggregate that
Dr. Ferrier suggests. In the way of direct evidence we
have, for example, Goltz declaring, on the strength of new
and careful experiments, that removal of any considerable
portion of the cortex in dogs is uniformly and permanently
attended by reduced skin-sensibility, impaired vision, and
weakened muscularity on the opposite side of the body.1 If
this be so, either there is no special localisation of motor
and sensory functions, but they are mixed up over the cor-
tex, or at least the different localised areas are much less
independent than they have seemed to Dr. Ferrier in the
ardour of new discovery. One cannot indeed, in hesitating
to go all lengths with Dr. Ferrier, straightway adopt the
former alternative and refuse to go with him at all, as Goltz
seems to do. His experiments are much too exact and
varied to be overturned by a different class of experiments
not as yet equally varied or exact : they can be refuted ex-
perimentally, one would think, only by some inquirer who
will perform them all over again arid show that they have
been at every step misrepresented or misinterpreted by Dr.
Ferrier. And this is hardly to be expected, more especially
as there is no intrinsic improbability — rather the reverse —
in the view, that impressions received by any organ of sense
are all carried up first to a particular region of the cortical
1 Dr. Ferrier has a supplementary note (to chap, ix.) upon Goltz's ex-
periments and makes light of them, partly on the ground that Goltz was
evidently unacquainted with his researches on the brains of monkeys
as already published in abstract (Prop. Roy. Soc., 162) early in 1875. It
certainly lessens the value of Goltz's paper that he makes no reference
to Dr. Ferrier's later researches, but that these " satisfactorily account
for the phenomena" described by Goltz is more than can be allowed.
(For reports on Goltz's researches see Mind, ii. 108, 247, v. 254, vii. 299.)
350 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.
substance before they are brought into relation with other
impressions and with motor impulses, or are otherwise
elaborated in the brain. It may well be that there are
special sensory regions in the brain-cortex, and that Dr.
Ferrier has given the first rough indication of their locality.
But even apart from conflicting evidence, seeing what the
brain is, and the work it has to do, one must gravely doubt
whether there are such sensory centres as Dr. Ferrier
supposes.
Let it be granted that destruction of the hippocampal
region in one hemisphere abolishes tactile sensibility in the
opposite side of the body. It is not therefore proved that
only touch is thereby affected, or that all tactile representa-
tions are blotted out of mental being, as Dr. Ferrier con-
ceives of his "sensory centre" (chap. xi. passim). Peripheral
impressions may be utterly prevented from coming into
consciousness by the cortical lesion ; but it does not follow
that the last act of the nervous process involved in a con-
scious sensation of touch is naturally consummated there
and nowhere else in the brain, or that in all that region
there is no work done but such as (subjectively) we call
touch. On the one hand, the cortical substance is thick and
histologically by no means uniform in the direction of its
thickness : what may be transacted in or through the
hippocampal area besides what there happens for touch,
Dr. Ferrier's experiments do nothing to tell, except only
that other sense-impressions are not there directly cut off.
On the other hand, touch (especially if understood, as Dr.
Ferrier understands it, to cover besides skin-sensibility of
every kind all that others mean by the muscular sense) is a
function so extremely wide, being commensurate with the
whole of objective knowledge presentative and representa-
tive, that to think of it as localised in one single convolution
of the whole brain is almost ludicrous. Even to suppose
that all tactile impressions, coming by such a multitude of
nerves, pass first to this one place is a considerable draft on
belief. But assuredly the whole work of touch is not so
transacted there as that the area can with any propriety be
called the exclusive centre of the sense. And the like must
be said of the other all-pervading sense of sight which Dr.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 351
Ferrier would locate in the angular gyrus as a definite
centre ; as also of the sense of hearing, related as this is,
through being involved in speech, to all that is most general
in knowledge.
On the whole, then, it seems impossible to allow that Dr.
Ferrier has done more than take a first step towards dis-
covering the relation of different parts in the brain ; nor is
it possible to say thus far that much psychological insight
is likely to be gained upon the new line of inquiry. Cer-
tainly, although he gives us in chap. xi. a view of " the
hemispheres considered psychologically " which is much
above the level of common physiological opinion, it does not
appear to depend specially upon his own investigations.
And that we are now put in the way to obtain a truly
scientific phrenology, embodying what was true in the old
phrenological doctrine (the notion of definite organ for
definite function), but based, as that was not, upon exact
anatomical and physiological inquiry in relation to exact
psychological analysis — this, which is becoming a fond con-
viction with many, is, to say the least, a very premature
hope. In some respects, the old phrenology was itself more
scientific than that which would now be substituted for it.
The ' faculties ' it supposed were, many of them, such as
might well be conceived to be distinctively organised in the
brain ; though psychological analysis had little difficulty in
proving them to be not ultimate functions but only varied
aggregates of the true elements of psychical life. Far other-
wise is it with the elements themselves, among which there
need be no scruple to rank the various kinds of sensation.
Differentiated as the organs of the senses are at the peri-
phery, and distinct as the nervous channels of each must be
till the convolutions are reached, sensations themselves as
conscious states (each sort appearing at the presentative,
representative, and re-representative stages, and all being
liable to be associated or fused in every possible variety) can
neither be supposed to be consummated at their first cortical
station, nor be either traced or thought likely to be traced
further by any experimental means yet devised.
No space is left to deal with the many other points of
psychological interest raised in Dr. Ferrier's important
352 THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BEAIN.
work ; chief among them being his treatment of the so-
called Muscular Sense, where he takes ground very decidedly
against those who attach the consciousness of activity
directly to the outgoing of motor impulse from the brain,
apart from any backward report (by afferent nerves) of its
effect in the muscles. I do not think he overthrows this
doctrine, or by any means establishes the contrary one, which
he advances in chap, ix., and then not seldom surrenders at
the most critical junctures in chap. xi. But there is not a
little force in some of his objections to the doctrine, and
both these and the new light he throws upon the subject by
experiment deserve the most careful consideration. This it
may be possible to give on some future occasion, and the rather
because the subject has become one of the first importance
in the psychology of the present day.
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND.1
DB. MAUDSLEY'S well-known work on the Physiology and
Pathology of Mind, having gone through two editions since
its publication in 1867, is now being re-issued in an altered
form. The original first part, revised and enlarged, appears
as a separate volume, and the Pathology as an independent
work will follow in due course.
The success of the book from its first appearance has been
well deserved. To say nothing of the special value of the
pathological section which in the new issue is not yet before
us, it is impossible to read Dr. Maudsley's general chapters
on the method of psychology and the relation between mind
and the nervous system, or his more specially physiological
chapters with a psychological reference, or his more specially
psychological chapters with a physiological reference, and
not undergo a genuine intellectual stimulation. There is
also t roughout a certain vigour of expression which, if at
times a trifle rough or even crude, not seldom is mellowed
into a grave eloquence, as when, for instance, he tries to
acknowledge the immeasurable debt of the individual to
mankind or considers the spectacle of human striving in
relation with the universal order. Nor is there lack of true
scientific insight, whether as turned upon the workings of
mind generally, or upon the special questions that have
engaged the attention of recent psychologists. On the subject
of unconscious mental life, no English psychologist is more
to be regarded than Dr. Maudsley. Few understand as
clearly the import of the motor side of the human system —
what he calls Actuation or Effection — in the explanation of
knowledge. And to mention one other point only, the very
last paragraph of his present volume, where he shortly con-
siders why we have no exact memory of pain, contains a
suggestion most strikingly illustrative of the advantage, or
1 By Henry Maudsley, M.D. London : Macmillan & Co., 1876. (Mind, ii. 235.)
23
354 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND.
rather the necessity, in studying Mind, of keeping that un-
ceasing hold upon physiological conditions for which it is his
real object to contend.
It is Dr. Maudsley's general position that most claims
attention on the issue of the present work as an independent
theoretic treatise. What is that notion of ' Physiology of
Mind ' which he seeks to put forward ? The words may
either mean, in a general sense, ' Natural Science of Mind,'
' Psychology as Natural Science,' or they may mean a theory
of Mind in relation with the special sense of physiological
science. To Dr. Maudsley, within the compass of his book,
they seem to mean both the one and the other, or, rather,
now the one and now the other, according to his mood —
and his mood varies. It is not possible to urge more
forcibly than he does how unscientific any doctrine of mind
must be that is not based on experience, and what a range
of experience (all, in a true sense, natural) is available for
scientific psychology. In the words of his own summary,
"the study of the plan of development of mind, the study of
its forms of degeneration in the insane and criminal, the
study of its progress and regress as exhibited in history, and
the study of biography," may none of them be neglected.
All this he understands as included in the inductive method
objectively applied to the investigation of mind, and such a
treatment might with good reason be called, as he sometimes
calls it, physiological. But, of course, the word is ambiguous,
and in general, throughout the work, he has the other
meaning in view, according to which the scientific doctrine
of mind is to be called ' physiology,' because mental pheno-
mena are specially connected with the organic processes of
the body generally, and the activity of the nervous system in
particular. Physiological investigation of the nervous and
general bodily system has in recent times made great and
steady progress, and it is Dr. Maudsley's great contention
that the hope of attaining positive knowledge concerning
mind is bound up with the advance of physiological science
in the strictest sense of the term. Therefore, in his first
edition, he made an " energetic exposition " of the short-
comings of what he calls variously "the method of introspec-
tion," " the method of self-consciousness," " the metaphysi-
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 355
cal method," "the psychological method," and also "psycho-
logy " simply. And though he seeks in the present edition
" to maintain the level of a more sober style," because he is
no longer so young and enthusiastic, and, besides, " the
physiological method " seems to him now-a-days to stand
above the need of defence or advocacy, he yet abates not one
jot of his old antagonism to any doctrine of mind that is
not in the special sense physiological. How does he then
understand such a doctrine ?
Here again his mood varies, and now in a way that is not
a little surprising. When the fit is on him, Dr. Maudsley
will hear of nothing but physiology — physiology of brain, and
woe be to the luckless introspectionist who ventures to think
of profiting by physiological discoveries and would fain
thereby seek to "put meaning into the vague and abstract
language of psychology : that would simply be to subject
physiology to the tortures of Mezentius — to stifle the living
in the embraces of the dead ". There is no question of brain
and mind, but it is "brain or mind" — "mind or brain";
and "mind "is to be understood as "mental organisation,"
and this again as " that organisation of brain which ministers
to mental function " ; for "the substance beneath" is brain
and only brain. Of course, then, there is no room but for
physiology. The scientific inquirer must work up from vital
to mental phenomena, and this he can do so perfectly upon
the strictly physiological track, that it is nothing short of a
pure hardship for him to have to express his results in the terms
of psychology — so vague, so obscure, so figurative, so full of
theory and the theory false, &c., &c. Because there is con-
tinuity between the physical processes of life in the organism
and the physical processes that have been discovered to be
concomitant with the phenomena of mind, Dr. Maudsley will
have it that brain and mind differ not otherwise than an
orange touched differs from the same orange seen ; and
thereupon he declares in a tone he loves to assume — "Above
all things it is now necessary that the absolute and unholy
barrier set up between psychical and physical nature be
broken down ". No wonder, if the psychical is just a kind of
physical, that he cannot have patience with introspective
psychologists trying to link their notion of mind with the
356 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND.
rich discoveries of physiology, and must tell them, whether
in sober style or not, that they seek "an unhallowed and
unnatural union which can only issue in abortions, or give
birth to monsters ". But when the fit is off, or rather in its
pauses — for it is never quite off — we hear another strain.
There is a " happy bridal union from which we may expect
vigorous offspring," and what may this be? It is "the
union of the subjective and objective methods," and this is
declared to be the true method of psychology — physiology no
more. Dr. Maudsley at an early stage of his exposition
adopts Comte's superficial objection against the possibility of
self-introspection ; but, like Comte himself, he finds he can
practise it perfectly well whenever there is occasion (as when
is there not?). Hear him when he is in the vein.
" We can observe the associations and sequences of mental
states without knowing their physical antecedents. More-
over, when we have discovered by objective inquiry the
physical antecedents, we must still depend upon the help
of subjective observation in order to establish the exact
sequences of the mental states, which we only know by
introspection, to the physical states which we observe and
make experiments upon" (p. 47). Again (p. 61) : "Every-
body (?) can perceive that feelings, ideas, volitions are
known through self-consciousness, and have only a sub-
jective meaning. And although they may, and no doubt
do, correspond to what, I suppose, we may call objective
changes in the nervous system, we cannot know them by
objective inquiry, any more than we can know the material
changes by mental introspection. No observation of the
brain, no investigation of its chemical activities, gives us
the least information respecting the states of feeling that
are connected with them ; as has been aptly remarked, it
is certain that the anatomist and physiologist might pass
centuries in studying the brain and nerves, without even
suspecting what a pleasure or a pain is, if they have not felt
both ; even vivisections teach us nothing except by the
interpretation which we give them through observation of
our own mental processes."
Nay, so certain is Dr. Maudsley now of the facts of sub-
jective experience, as revealed by self -introspection, that he
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 357
does not hesitate with the veriest idealist that ever was to
declare that, when we are dealing with purely natural forces
such as electricity and chemical affinity, and the changes
in matter to which they are sequent, all the " sequences,
as known to us, are only states of consciousness " ! (p. 63).
Might Dr. Maudsley then fairly disclaim, as he originally
did, any "absurd attempt to repudiate introspective observa-
tion entirely " ? Assuredly. But might his critics as fairly
charge him with seeking " to employ the physiological
method exclusively '"? Assuredly also. This is what conies
of an exposition so very " energetic" in one phase as to ex-
clude the possibility of there being another or make its later
recognition a piece of gratuitous, and not quite harmless,
inconsistency. The time is long past — if there ever was a
time — when such an advocacy of the ' physiological method '
could serve a good purpose. Since when has there been any
indisposition on the part of serious psychologists to accept
all physiological results, really established, that have a bear-
ing on the conclusions obtained by what Dr. Maudsley
himself, as we have seen, allows is the perfectly legitimate
and indispensable method of introspective inquiry? Let
physiologists bethink them why on their side it is only so
recently that results have been obtained worthy of being
taken into account for the general science of mind. It will
be time enough to deride the willingness of psychologists
to appropriate the results of physiology, when physiologists
show not less readiness to pay heed to the best results of
the introspective method, instead of themselves making
crude attempts at psychological analysis. Meanwhile, the
energy of Dr. Maudsley's exposition can only have the effect
of confirming the unwary among his brethren in the very
attitude of psychological ignorance which, happily for him-
self, he has never seriously maintained.
Curiously enough, too, in this so-called Physiology of
Mind, while it is those parts of the book where Dr. Maudsley
is constrained to become the advocate of the method of in-
trospection that are most to be recommended to physiologists,
the more strictly physiological parts are not in turn those
which the psychologists need most to lay to heart. Even
before the present generation there have been professed
358 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND.
psychologists as deeply imbued as Dr. Maudsley himself
with the physiological spirit, though unlike him in keeping
steadily in view, and not forgetting and remembering by
turns, the subjective aspect of mental life. But one thing
the psychologists have been slow to learn — the necessity of
studying mind on a broader scale than the self-consciousness
of the individual or of studying the individual mind in express
relation to the social environment wherein it is developed.
Now of this necessity Dr. Maudsley has so firm a grasp that,
though he impresses it but incidentally in his book, he truly
deserves to be distinguished as one of the pioneers in a path
of inquiry which English psychologists must no longer delay
to tread. True, the introspective analysis they have pertina-
ciously followed out is the indispensable foundation for
effective conclusions on this or any other line of positive in-
quiry in relation to mind,1 to say nothing of its import for
general philosophy, which comes little into Dr. Maudsley's
view. Yet there could be no greater mistake, in trying to
deal scientifically with such a subject as Mind, than to be slow
to adopt a new point of view, so obviously suggested by the
advance of other special sciences and by the growth of the
conception of order as pervading every way the stream of
phenomenal occurrence. For all the psychological books
that have been written, with or without regard to the
strictly physiological conditions of mental life, we are still
far from understanding the actual process of development
of the mind, related as it is in every individual not only to
the world of natural experience but to that complex of con-
ditions which, while also natural in a wider sense, are, for
men at least, properly called social. All credit is due to Dr.
Maudsley for his intelligent appreciation of what remains to
1 This was a point well urged by Mr. Stewart in Mind, No. 4, in
his short paper entitled ' Psychology — a Science or a Method ? '. • Mr.
Stewart did not, however, carry me with him to his conclusion that
psychology is a method and not a science ; and when he represented
this as the position of earlier English inquirers like Hume, he surely
overlooked the emphatic assertion in the introduction to the Treatise of
Human Nature, that the object was to obtain a " science of man " by the
same method of " experience and observation " as had recently led to
the extraordinary advance of physical science ; though with this was
coupled the philosophical idea that the science of man when thus got
would form " the only solid foundation for the other sciences ".
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MIND. 359
be done on this side for psychological science ; and only
there is room for regret that he cannot advocate this or any
other true conception without marvelling overmuch at the
intellectual weakness of those who cling to that subjective
study of mind which first engaged the attention of philo-
sophic thinkers and may not be neglected to the last even by
' mental physiologists '.
HUME'S TREATISE.1
THE revival of interest in Hume's philosophy is one of the
most marked features in the thought of the present day.
At home, though he never was put outside the philosophic
pale (as foreign critics are rather prone to suppose), it is
true that, since the generation of the Eeids and Beatties and
Campbells whom he so greatly exercised, he has seldom been
either consciously followed or expressly opposed ; and the
more remarkable therefore is that new interest, variously
begotten, which has resulted already in the edition of his
philosophical works so elaborately prefaced by Prof. Green.
Nor is the interest less signal abroad, as shown by the two
works here thrown together, though they are only the
latest among many similar evidences.
M. Pillon, in his striking Introduction, tells us plainly
why he and his master, M. Renouvier, have joined to produce
this first French translation of the work of Hume's youth.
M. Renouvier's doctrine is not such a mere outgrowth from
the Critical Philosophy as to be in relation with Hume's
thought only through Kant. While holding fast by the
" Apriorism " and all the ethical implications of the Kantian
doctrine, M. Renouvier's philosophy is a system of pure
phenomenism, and rejects the notion of Substance which
Kant brought back in the guise of the noiimenal thing-in-
itself after it had been expelled by Hume. From Locke
through Berkeley to Hume as well as Kant, and from Hume
1 Traite de la Nature Humaine (Livre premier, ou 'De 1'Entendement'),
traduit pour la premiere fois, par MM. Ch. Renouvier et F. Pillon, et
Essais Philosophiques sur 1'Entendement (traduction de Merian corrigee).
Avec une Introduction par M. F. Pillon. Paris : Au Bureau de la Critique
Philosophique, 1878. Pp. Ixxii., 581.
Hume-Studien. I. Zur Geschichte und Kritik des modernen Nominalis-
mus. Von Dr. Alexius Meinong. Wien : Gerold's Sohn, 1877. Pp. 78.
(Mind, iii. 384.)
HUME'S TREATISE. 361
and Kant to M. Renouvier, in whom the differences of these
two become reconciled, — lies, we are told, the progress of
the critical idea in modern philosophy. This may be a
somewhat exclusive reading of the post-Kantian movement,
ignoring the not less remarkable phenomenism (upon a
Kantian basis) of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson, to say nothing of
the similar doctrine struck out already in Kant's day by
that acutest of his critics, the Jew Salomon Maimon, whose
anticipation of his own thinking Mr. Hodgson so generously
acknowledges in his new work, The Philosophy of Beflection.
But the succession has the merit of placing Hume in a light
not more striking than true, and it adequately explains the
anxiety of M. Renouvier and his able and indefatigable
associate, M. Pillon, to make Hume known in France by
that earlier and greater Treatise of Human Nature, which
alone contains his critical doctrine of Substance. The
relation between the Treatise and the later Inquiry (which
very soon passed into French as into other languages, to
the gratification of Hume's whim that by it alone he should
be judged) is on the whole very accurately conceived by M.
Pillon ; and, if he contends for the philosophical superiority
of the earlier work, while asserting their general identity
of spirit, he is careful to note also the occasional points where
(as on the subject of psychological causality) the shorter Inquiry
is more explicit. He omits, however, in this connexion all
reference to the passages that serve to determine the extent
of Kant's acquaintance with Hume, though nothing so
nearly concerns his own view of Hume's importance in the
general critical movement. If, as the internal, even more
than the external, evidence seems to make sure, Kant knew
nothing of the Human Nature, it was open to M. Pillon to
urge that Kant lagged behind in respect of the doctrine of
Substance, because he was ignorant of Hume's advance.1
lrThe internal evidence consists chiefly of the two points : (1) that Kant
charges Hume with discussing the question of the validity of human
knowledge not in its full generality, but upon the single issue of causation
— which is true of the Inquiry ; (2) that he declares Hume to have
recognised only a logical necessity in mathematical cognition — which is
again true of the Inquiry but the Inquiry only. M. Pillon sets out the
very different view of mathematical judgments to be found in the Human
Nature, without remarking the curious change- — being a reversion to
Locke's position — that had taken place in Hume's mind as to this part
362 HUME'S TREATISE.
M. Pillon's criticism on Hume's philosophical doctrines is
in general not less forcible than his exposition of these is
admirably concise ; but the justice of his view that " Sensa-
tionism" reached its final expression in Hume and stood
self -convicted of insufficiency, depends on what meaning is
given to that word. Hume did unquestionably carry to a
legitimate conclusion Locke's statement of the sources of
human knowledge, and, either failing to account for the
plain i'acts of our intellectual consciousness or accounting
for them only by a surreptitious assumption of other principles,
may truly be said to have demonstrated the insufficiency of
Experientialism as it was then understood. But it is not
therefore clear that the alternative to " Sensationism " lay in
such a system of " Apriorism " as Kant set in its place, and
his followers, critical or criticist, would in different forms
still maintain. The Experientialism now once more in the
ascendant is neither that of Locke and Hume, nor, however
allied in spirit, related to it in the way of affiliation.
Appearing as the natural reflex of general scientific progress
in the interval, it conceives the whole question of Knowledge
in a larger way. It does not dream of tracing the growth
of consciousness in the individual, psychologically, from the
occurrence of a hap-hazard series of impressions passively
received, or, philosophically, of making the individual's
subjective experience the test of scientific truth. When M.
Pillon contends against Hume for " categories, concepts,
forms and laws of mind " or what not, in supplement to
discrete sense-impressions, he puts only in one way what
experientialists at the present day put in another when,
besides crediting the individual with a personal activity, and
besides allowing for inherited predispositions, they further
suppose a non-personal element of knowledge in the slowly
of his doctrine before the Inquiry appeared. The Human Nature was
not translated into German till 1790-1 ; the Inquiry was accessible to
Kant in Sulzer's translation from 1755. (This last date is wrongly given
as 1775 in the English translation of Ueberweg's Geschichte.)
Mr. Sh. Hodgson, in the preface to his new work, p. 14, has some
admirably pointed sentences on Hume, but appears to overlook the
evidences just quoted when he says : " The Hume that belongs to the
history of philosophy, the Hume that roused Kant from his ' dogmatic
slumber,' will always be best known to us from the Treatise of Human
Nature ".
HUME'S TREATISE. U63
developed social tradition of language, &c., moulding into
common forms the product of each individual's reaction upon
his incidental experience. And if it should be said that this
amounts to an abandonment of the position to the adversary
the reply is that the rationalist has had gradually to abandon
more and more of his pretensions from the time when expe-
rience was counted as nought towards the result of knowledge,
till now he is left only with an assumption of barren forms
which, though truly not explicable from individual experience,
are there chiefly as a datum to be accounted for by reference
to the slow deposit of experience in generation after genera-
tion. But, however it be with this question of principle, M.
Pillon, it must be granted, follows his master M. Renouvier
in giving something more than merely formal answers to
the questions that occupy the modern psychological school,
and there are several passages in this Introduction well
deserving of close attention as examples of a remarkable, and
as yet too little known, phase of contemporary thinking.
Hume's doctrine of Abstract Ideas (on which M. Pillon
has some acute remarks) is selected by Dr. Meinong as the
central subject of the first in a series of Hume- Studies, which
he has begun to contribute to the Proceedings of the Vienna
Academy, The doctrine, while set out in a very character-
istic and important chapter of the Human Nature, is one of
those that have no place in the Inquiry, and Dr. Meinong's
view is that the question of the true relation of the two
works can be brought to a settlement only by such an ex-
haustive scrutiny of their differential parts as he here begins.
His tractate (published separately as above) has, however,
also the more general character of a contribution to the
history and criticism of Modern Nominalism. Thus, he
enters somewhat minutely into Berkeley's theory of
Abstract Ideas, with which Hume so expressly connects
his own, and this of course carries him farther back to
Locke, whom Berkeley expressly opposed. Then, although
it seems to be his opinion that Hume omitted his earlier
doctrine from the Inquiry because of its manifest imper-
fections, Dr. Meinong believes that he finds distinct traces
of its influence on the views of later English psychologists.
364 HUME'S TREATISE.
And he also includes, within his brief but closely-argued
essay, an independent discussion of the question at issue.
In his critical exposition of the historically connected
views of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, Dr. Meinong offers
some fresh observations ; as when he very neatly remarks
on Locke's paradoxical statement as to the difficulty of
forming the general idea of a triangle (which " must be
neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural,
nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once "), that it
is based on a confusion of the extent with the content of a
notion. It was against this and other statements of Locke's
that Berkeley directed his famous protest so often cited as
an enunciation of thoroughgoing Nominalism ; but Dr.
Meinong points out that in reality Berkeley lays no positive
stress upon the function of language in generalisation,
neither asserting that names alone are general (the true
note of Nominalism according to Dr. Meinong) nor even
maintaining that names are an indispensable help to con-
ceiving, though it is true that on the one point of the use
of language in symbolic thinking he goes to exceptional
lengths. Hume, therefore, who does take his stand upon
the generalising agency of language, was in error when he
supposed that he was simply passing on and confirming the
doctrine of Berkeley ; and to him, rather than to Berkeley,
says Dr. Meinong, should be assigned the name of the father
of Modern Nominalism.
This last remark, in the connexion in which it is made
by Dr. Meinong, is not without its justification. While
Hume expressly declares that "a particular idea becomes
general by being annexed to a general term, that is, to a
term which from a customary conjunction has a relation to
many other particular ideas and readily recalls them in
imagination," Berkeley supposes generalisation to consist
in the mere representation (suggestion) of a number of
particular ideas on occasion of one, and takes representation
by means of a name (which is itself a particular idea) to be
only one case in which the principle applies, though it is
that one which, according to him, has misled Locke and
others into thinking that the mind has hold of properly
abstract ideas in correspondence with the names. Dr.
HUME'S TREATISE. 365
Meinong, however, is surely somewhat at fault, when upon
that single ground he enthrones Hume in place of Berkeley,
and would have it that all later nominalists are what they
are because of Hume's example. To say nothing, in the
first instance, of an influence from Hobbes (who, before
Locke, might be expected to figure in a historical view of
Modern Nominalism1), what real evidence is there that the
thinkers who have come after Hume have been specially
affected by his nominalistic utterances ? Dr. Meinong
refers but to four — the two Mills, Prof. Bain and M. Taine
(whom, though a Frenchman, he very properly classes with
the English succession). Now among these he finds the
younger Mill to be in strictness more conceptualist than
nominalist, but in any case to have held a view of abstrac-
tion and generalisation very different from Hume's. James
Mill and, in one place, Prof. Bain, are found expressing
opinions that have some affinity with parts of Hume's
doctrine, but there is not the least proof of direct obligation
in either case. Finally, of M. Taine, Dr. Meinong can only
say (with questionable correctness) that his Nominalism
goes farther than Hume's, and is of a type that hardly any
thinker of mark would now care to approve. s There is in
reality, so far as regards the Mills, much more evidence,
both external and internal, of influence from Hobbes than
from Hume, and the truth about the English thinkers
generally is rather this, that from the days of Hobbes (to
go no farther back) they have all been nominalistic in
spirit. Locke, despite his occasional lapses into ultra-con-
ceptualism, is in the main almost ultra-nominalist, and this
most probably in unacknowledged dependence on his pre-
decessor. Berkeley, though most concerned to establish
against Locke the individualised definiteness of mental re-
presentations, shows himself anything but oblivious of the
haunting presence of language with every act of general
intellection. Only if Nominalism is defined — with apparent
sharpness but really without point — as meaning that nothing
is general but names, can it be a question whether Berkeley
and Locke are nominalists, and when it is so defined it
may well be doubted whether Hume is in truth more nomi-
nalist than they. Nominalism would seem to be strictly
366 HUME'S TREATISE.
enough understood when taken as the view according to
which the mind is declared impotent to know generally, or
to conceive, without the help of some system of definite
particular marks or signs.
The outcome of Dr. Meinong's very careful inquiry as
regards Hume in particular, is that he fails by not taking
account of the intension of concepts and by seeking to
explain their extension from association of ideas. Hume is
supposed by Dr. Meinong to be the first who made Associa-
tion a general principle of psychological science,1 and to
have been misled into applying it without due discrimina-
tion. The principle, it is urged, cannot account for that
aspect of the notion which is called its extension, because
this, unlike the intension, has no ideal fixity but is liable
to vary indefinitely with real experience (p. 30). Perhaps
I fail to apprehend Dr. Meinong's true meaning here ; but
if not, the observation does not seem very much in place.
The fact that the extension is really indefinite is not incon-
sistent with the supposition that the concept became formed
in the mind by a more or less definite association of parti-
cular resemblances or resembling objects. Nor, on the
other hand, is the intension either so ideally fixed as to be
practically unchangeable, or itself not amenable to Associa-
1 M. Pillon, in a short paper entitled ' Quel est le veritable pere de la
psychologic associationiste ? ' (La Critique Philosophique, 27th Dec., 1877)
makes a like claim for Hume, and blames Mill and others for ascribing
so much importance to Hartley. Now it is true that Hume published
his Human Nature eleven years before Hartley's Observations on Man, and
Mill is clearly wrong in point of fact, when he says that Hartley " was
the man of genius who first clearly discerned that the great fundamental
law of the Association of Ideas is the key to the explanation of the more
complex mental phenomena" (Pref. to his father's Analysis, 1869). But,
on the other hand, there is every reason to suppose that Hartley, who so
scrupulously makes his acknowledgments to Gay, borrowed nothing
whatever from Hume ; and Mill's very statement" proves how much more
potent Hartley's influence has been than Hume's upon the later associa-
tionists like himself. Everything, in fact, goes to show that Mill got his
impulse through his father from Hartley and Hobbes, rather than from
Hume ; while as for Associationism, its true origins are to be sought further
back than hi Hume. Berkeley is implicitly a thoroughgoing associationist,
and Locke himself, when he speaks (with still earlier sensationalists) of
' compounding,' has partial hold of the general principle of mental
synthesis called later on, by Hume and others, Association of Ideas.
(This last phrase, it has often been remarked, heads a chapter in Locke's
Essay, but only with a quite special reference to the explanation of
mental idiosyncrasies hi different people.)
HUME'S TREATISE. 367
tion (in this case 'contiguous'), whenever it involves a
synthesis of a number of attributes found to be conjoined
in experience. Hume's doctrine is imperfect in many ways
as an account of the psychological formation of the concept,
but its fault does not lie in the part assigned to Association
(whether by similarity or contiguity). It fails chiefly by
not carrying out that reference, begun by Berkeley, to the
function of Attention, which is the positive factor in the act
of Abstraction.
One word, before closing, on Dr. Meinong's valuable
discussion of the material question. His solution of the
various disputes as to the relation in knowledge between
the General and Particular on the one hand and the
Abstract and Concrete on the other is, in my judgment,
essentially correct. There is no generalisation without
abstraction, but abstraction is possible without generalisa-
tion. Abstracts may well be singular, and, whether singular
or general, they are not confined to mere attributes of
concrete objects. Generals are always abstract. Concretes
are always individual or singular, but the knowledge of
them includes only in each case such conjunction of attri-
butes as directly impresses the -senses. Individuals are
mostly known in a form more or less abstract. These are
a few of Dr. Meinong's positions, and the others to be found
in his pages, though they do not exhaust the subject, make
up a very important contribution to its scientific determi-
nation. In particular may be noted his criticism of the
common dictum that extension and intension vary inversely
— a dictum which, if it implies that all generals are abstract,
no less implies that all abstracts are general. Dr. Meinong
offers a better statement of the conditions under which the
dictum is applicable than is to be found, I think, in any
of the books. His Hume- Studies, if they may be judged by
the first of them, promise to be deserving of all attention.
BACON'S NOVUM OEGANUM.1
THERE can hardly be any class of readers of the Novum
Organum whose requirements will not be satisfied by this
elaborately annotated edition. If the famous work has still
an educational value, the learners who may be set to master
its many difficulties could not desire a better key than
Prof. Fowler supplies ; and so completely has the task
been performed of tracing Bacon's wealth of allusions to
their original sources; of giving cross-references to his other
works, and of bringing the light of later philosophy and
science to bear upon every one of his characteristic state-
ments, that there is no other edition to which more advanced
students or the general reader should henceforth more
readily turn. If for these, indeed, Mr. Ellis's direction, in
the collected edition of Bacon's works, may seem to have
been already sufficient, the justification of Prof. Fowler's
labours would have to be sought in his supplying the
educational want ; and it can hardly be said that he does
make out a very strong case for placing the Novum
Organum in the hands of logical tyros. Nobody, of course,
can read the pithy wisdom of the First Book without profit ;
but to justify the prescription of the Second Book in a
logical education, more is necessary than the assurance that,
at least in some of the ' Praerogativae Instantiarum,'
" many of the expressions employed still form part of our
logical terminology," or that " it would be very difficult in
many cases to describe more aptly and precisely than Bacon
does the nature of the reasoning involved " (p. 131). The
Second Book, I should say, has now an historical value only,
and a general understanding of its terminology, in so far as
1 Edited with Introduction, Notes, &c., by Thomas Fowler, M.A.,
Professor of Logic in the University of Oxford, Fellow of Lincoln College.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878. (Mind, iv. 125.)
BACON'S NOVLJM ORGANUM. 369
this has passed into current philosophical usage, would seem
to be the utmost that can profitably be required of the
common run of students. It is possible, therefore, that not
very many of this class will ever come under obligation to
Prof. Fowler for the floods of light he throws upon the dark
places they would find at every turn of their path.
For others the special interest of this edition lies in the
seventeen sections of the Introduction (pp. 1-151). These
are of a somewhat heterogeneous cast and not ordered
according to any distinct principle, but they have the merit
of bringing together nearly everything that needs to be
known for the understanding of Bacon's place in the history
of science and philosophy. Though it might not be difficult
to add even to Prof. Fowler's extended list of testimonies
to Bacon's influence or to cite still other anticipations of
Bacon's conceptions than those that are here with so much
care brought together, none could be adduced that would in
the least alter the estimate to be drawn of Bacon's perform-
ance. Nor will the estimate drawn by any dispassionate
judge of the whole evidence differ materially (except in one
particular) from Prof. Fowler's own. Without being in the
least blind to Bacon's philosophic and scientific deficiencies,
Prof. Fowler rests upon thoroughly solid grounds his claim
to a high place in the roll of philosophic thinkers. " While
Bacon (he says) undoubtedly did not possess any extensive
or precise acquaintance with any single branch of science,
and while, in some respects, his writings did not keep pace
with the discoveries of the day, his range of vision covered
an extraordinarily vast sweep of knowledge, and his scientific
conceptions and the suggestions which from time to time
he throws out, occasionally show a marvellous amount of
sagacity and penetration." This is a sober strain compared
with the indiscriminate panegyric that used to be heard, but
the statement is perfectly warranted as against the not less
indiscriminate depreciation of Bacon which of late years has
become fashionable among scientific authorities.
It is when he treats or whenever he has occasion to touch
011 the question of Bacon's influence upon his successors
that Prof. Fowler's footing becomes less certain. He would
fain represent the influence as very considerable, but when
24
370 BACON'S NOVUM ORGANUM.
he passes from general surmises to specific assertions his
slenderness or absence of grounds becomes only too
apparent. He does not indeed repeat the common error of
Macaulay, Fischer, Remusat and others, and imagine a
profound influence from Bacon on his immediate successor,
Hobbes, in the teeth of their complete difference of method
and the younger thinker's absolute disregard of the elder.
But if he finds any habit of thinking that may with some
reason be called national, he must ascribe its origination to
Bacon, however it may have been manifested by English-
men as distinctly before as after him ; and if philosophical
inquiry in England has at a later time taken any marked
directions, these must be supposed to have been indicated
or opened up by Bacon, though hardly anything can be
shown to have been farther from the thought of the great
Instaurator. Thus Prof. Fowler refers to the habit of
making sharp separation of Religion and Science, Faith and
Reason, and this, though not (as he himself notes) peculiar
to English thinkers, has undoubtedly been very marked in
the greatest of them from Bacon onwards ; but, however
the fact may be explained — by national character or other-
wise— the habit is certainly not less pronounced in thinkers
of English name in a far earlier time and quite other
circumstances, for example, in William of Ockham. As
regards specific doctrines, one or two of Prof. Fowler's
points may be a little more particularly noticed.
He supposes that Bacon's notion of a lower soul in man,
shared by the brutes and materially generated, "may not
unnaturally have contributed to the formation of material-
istic hypotheses as to the formation of the soul in general
among his successors, with whom the twofold division
disappeared". The facts by no means bear out this
supposition. Hobbes, if Hobbes is meant, came by his
materialism not through any process of dropping part of the
earlier conception of separate souls, but through being so
overmastered by the idea of the new (or revived) mechanical
philosophy as to ignore the subjectivity of mind in his
eagerness to express all experienced change in terms of
motion. Locke's speculations, too, as to whether it might
not have pleased the Deity to " superadd to matter a faculty
BACON'S NOVUM ORGANUM. 371
of thinking," such as he had analysed it phenomenally, are
obviously not less alien from the ancient metaphysical
doctrine in Bacon's or any other version. In truth, after
Bacon, it was not only the distinction of lower and higher
souls that disappeared, but (by the growth partly of physical
and partly of psychological science) the whole of that earlier
way of thinking, which Bacon himself had been content to
pass on.
Take next Prof. Fowler's remark, on occasion of Bacon's
enumeration of mental faculties and naive statement of their
mutual relations, that " the sharp line of demarcation
•drawn here and in similar passages between the office of the
so-called faculties was a common feature of the philosophy
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has only
been replaced in comparatively recent times by a more just
appreciation of the complexity of our various mental opera-
tions and of the number of elements which go to make up
some even of those psychical acts which at first sight appear
the simplest ". Here it is not expressly stated that the
English psychologists in these centuries were led by Bacon
to divide the mind into ' faculties ' ; but if it had been
remembered that it was precisely the English psychologists,
beginning with Hobbes in the very generation after Bacon,
who first took up the ground they have always since main-
tained against the ' faculty '-hypothesis, there could hardly
have been a stronger proof given that Bacon exercised no
influence at all upon the most characteristically English
movement within modern mental philosophy — the con-
tinuous pursuit of psychological inquiry in the spirit of
positive science. When, therefore, after particularising
some others of Bacon's antiquated psychological notions,
Prof. Fowler proceeds to say that "it is impossible not to
see in these speculations, crude as some of them are, the
beginnings of much of the later English psychology which
became so famous in the hands of Locke, Hume, Reid, and
others," one can only express surprise that he should be able
to see it, at least as regards Locke and Hume.1 As for the
J The case is different with Reid, who was a strenuous upholder — in
British psychology the reviver — of the ' faculty '-hypothesis ; and Reid,
we know, had an unbounded veneration for Bacon. It is not indeed
372 BACON'S NOVUM ORGANUM.
anticipations which Prof. Fowler thinks he finds in Bacon
of later ethical ideas, it is perhaps sufficient to note his own
admission that Bacon " nowhere expressly discusses the
fundamental questions of Morals, such as the grounds of
Moral Obligation or the nature of the Moral Faculty," — in
short, attempts neither of the characteristic tasks that
English thinkers have set before them in the one other
department of mental philosophy, besides psychology, which
they have specially cultivated.
Altogether, it can by no means be maintained that Bacon's
greatness lay in his definite anticipation of coming achieve-
ments in science or philosophy. Science and philosophy, it
is not too much to say, would be to all intents and purposes
exactly where they are, though he had never been or never
written ; and there are other names in Bacon's century of
which it would be rash so to speak. Does Bacon therefore
fall out of the first rank of philosophical thinkers? That is
a question of a rather vain description, which different
people will answer differently ; but the most strenuous of
his depreciators will find it hard to name another thinker of
the second class who can be compared with him for breadth
of view. As a preacher in a time of intellectual uprising he
has never had an equal.
necessary to suppose that he borrowed from Bacon in this particular.
Still it is significant that his view of the mind's ' faculties ' or ' powers,'
however elaborately worked out, is almost as naive and unscientific as
Bacon's own .
HUME.1
THIS short account by a man of science of one who was
more than a man of letters presents some notable features.
The biographical part, consisting of forty-four pages in all,
is less detailed than could be wished or might have been
expected : still the author, with characteristic art, has man-
aged to convey by a few firm strokes a very distinct impres-
sion of the manner of man that Hume was ; and, few as the
pages are, they yet include well-selected representative
extracts not only from Hume's charming correspondence
but also from the more popular of his essays. He is thus not
inadequately portrayed on most of his sides ; nor are his
foibles and prejudices by any means forgotten in the general
picture that is given of placid strength of mind and character.
In particular, the reader may carry away from the sketch
the essentially true impression of Hume's philosophical
activity — that here was a man fitted as few have ever been
to sound all the deepest questions of human concern, yet
withal one who did not live for that kind of work. The
precocious development of Hume's speculative ardour was
followed by its contented repression in mature years ; while his
striving after momentary effect and personal distinction is
visible alike in the more than candid self-exposure of his
earlier philosophical manner, and, when that failed of the
mark, in the polished reserve and studied innuendo of his later.
Prof. Huxley makes no pretence that he is dealing with one
of the loftier spirits of the race. But if there is one man
more than another whose thinking has to be reckoned with
in these days it is Hume, and, such as it is, it can have no
more fitting interpreter than a man of science.
Though he shows his sense of its exceeding importance
1 By Professor HUXLEY. ('English Men of Letters Series,' edited bv
John Morley.) London : Macmillan, 1879. Pp. 208. (Mind, iv. 270.) "
374 HUME.
by giving to the Philosophy more than three-fourths of the
whole space at his command, Prof. Huxley does not of
course aim at producing a balanced exposition of the whole.
When he has traced Hume's account of the origin of know-
ledge up to the point when the generalising and objectifying
agency of Language conies into play in the form of proposi-
tions, he is forced to confine himself to those philosophical
topics that are of more general interest to mankind, and
which, probably on that account, were those that continued
to engage Hume's own thoughts after the wider-ranging
activity of his youthful intellect was spent. Upon such
subjects as Miracles in relation to the Order of Nature, the
Soul, Theism, &c., Hume's ideas get, in some eighty pages,
that sympathetic exposition, mixed with vigorous and inde-
pendent criticism, that was to be expected from his present
interpreter. In this place, however, we may rather note a
few points in Prof. Huxley's treatment of the foundations
of Hume's philosophy, which he has sought to repair and
make good in the light of more advanced knowledge.
He would amend the scheme of the sources of knowledge
by adding to Hume's enumeration of the senses, " the
muscular sense, which had not come into view in Hume's
time" ; by extruding the passions or emotions (Hume's so-
called ' impressions of reflexion') as being all of them " com-
plex states arising from the close association of ideas of
pleasure and pain with other ideas" ; but, chiefly, by positing
" as ultimate irresolvable facts of conscious experience " three
feelings or " impressions of relation" namely, co-existence,
succession, similarity and dissimilarity. He is, of course,
perplexed by Hume's unaccountable wavering in the matter
of Relations, and sees the need of making a clear and decisive
affirmation on this all-important head ; but, whatever may
be said against Hume's uncertain enumeration of the formal
elements, it would not be easy for Prof. Huxley to prove his
own sufficient for the explanation of knowledge as exhibited
by any human mind. Nor is his statement of the material
elements up to the mark of modern psychological science
when he is content, under the head of Sensations, to add
to the usual five senses " Resistance (the muscular sense),"
and makes "Pleasure and Pain" a co-ordinate chief head.
HUME. 375
Impressions (1) of Sensation, (2) of Pleasure and Pain, (3)
of Relations (as above), are hardly an adequate scheme of
the " Contents of the Mind".
How the impressions arise or come to pass in conscious-
ness is the next question dealt with, and here Prof. Huxley,
while noting again a want of decision in Hume's answers,
due (as he thinks) partly to his apparent unfamiliarity with
even such knowledge of the physiological conditions of
consciousness as was then current, declares for himself " that
the materials of consciousness are products of cerebral activity,"
" effects or products of material phenomena," or, as he
says more explicitly in another connexion, ''products of the
inherent properties of the thinking organ, in which they lie
potentially, before they are called into existence by their
appropriate causes ". In calling them, however, effects of
material phenomena, he is careful to explain that he means
nothing inconsistent with the idealistic position — "that when-
ever those states of consciousness which we call sensation or
emotion or thought come into existence, complete investi-
gation will show good reason for the belief that they are
preceded by those other phenomena of consciousness to
which we give the names of matter and motion". And
whether these phenomena, in the last resort, are due to the
evolution of the mind as a " Leibnizian monad or Fichtean
world-generating ego," or are symbols (not copies) of " a real
something" in relation with "the part of that something
which we call the nervous system " — are two suppositions
which, in his view, are equally possible in themselves and
equally beyond the possibility of being either of them
exclusively established.
There is some very striking expression, on p. 81, in the
short development of this view, but the author seems open
to the charge of not keeping sufficiently apart two different
kinds of consideration. There is, of course, a good meaning
in saying that sensations arise when certain changes are
effected in the nervous system, and, in this point of view,
do not arise without such antecedents or (more strictly)
accompaniments. There is' also a good meaning in saying
that the physiological accompaniments have themselves an
expression in terms of conscious experience, and, from this
376 HUME.
higher point of view, cannot be allowed to be the absolute
conditions of mind which the materialists suppose. But
what is of chief importance is that the two points of view
should be clearly severed, and this they hardly are when it
is said that the phenomena of sensation, &c., are, in the
"idealistic " point of view, to be regarded as " preceded by
those other phenomena of consciousness to which we give
the names of matter and motion". From the idealistic,
which is the philosophical, point of view, there is in truth
no question of a relation of sensation or other subjective ex-
perience to anything that is ever called matter and motion.
When we speak of such a relation, we ara at the other point
of view — the point of view of positive science. The question
of the " origin " of states of consciousness is, in fact, an
ambiguous one ; and this, it may be added, makes it especi-
ally important in describing their physical relations, which
is one question, not to speak of them as "products" or
" effects " of nervous processes, when such terms, if at all
strictly interpreted, must be held to exclude, or at all events
prejudge, the other, or philosophical, question. It is possible
that Hume refrained from such a statement as Prof.
Huxley offers less from ignorance of such physiology as was
accessible to him than because he remembered that he was
engaged upon a philosophical inquiry.
On the historic question of Innate Ideas so lightly skimmed
over by Hume, Prof. Huxley takes occasion to quote some
passages from Descartes' minor writings, which should
be noted by students of the history of philosophy as
showing how circumspect that thinker could be, when he
chose, in his statement of the relation of reason to experi-
ence in knowledge. More particularly, they prove him to
have clearly anticipated the kind of answer, which Leibniz,
in the Nouveaux Essais, takes, and usually gets, the credit of
having made to the arguments of Locke. In comparison
with Descartes, Hume is rightly charged by his critic with
an imperfect appreciation of the import of the question and
an inadequate resolution of it.
Kightly, too (as I think) — to refer but to one other point
of the detailed exposition — does Professor Huxley, when
dealing with Hume's account of " Abstract Ideas," in rela-
HUME. 377
tion to language, lay stress on the different cases of concepts,
as they stand related or not to definite percepts. While
highly abstract qualities of things or relations amongst things
may safely be pronounced unthinkable without the help of
definite marks and signs, it has been too readily assumed by
nominalists that the corresponding words are in like manner
indispensable to the mind's comprehension of sensible objects.
In spite of what Berkeley, once for all, so triumphantly
urged against the easy-going assumption of conceptualist
thinkers — that there is no more difficulty in the definite
representation of generals than of singulars — the circum-
stances in which concepts are formed are in fact so different
as to preclude the possibility of making any hard and fast
statement as to the representability or non-representability
of generals. When definite percepts are experienced with
well-marked common features overpowering individual dif-
ferences, it is quite intelligible, according to psychological
law, that there should arise representatively some schema
more or less definite which for purposes of (general) thought
may stand for the multitude of singulars. This seems to be
the view that Prof. Huxley seeks to express in less technical
language, and in illustration he very happily refers to Mr.
Galton's production of the typical face of a class by super-
position of portraits of similar individuals on the same
photographic plate.
The earlier chapter on " The Object and Scope of Philo-
sophy," with which Prof. Huxley passes to the second and
more serious part of his task, deserves, in conclusion, to be
still more particularly noted. Though it may not contain
anything that is unfamiliar to philosophical students, it is
really, for its length, a very good statement of the meaning
of philosophy in relation to the sciences, and also, more
especially, of the relation of philosophy to psychology.
Taking Kant's famous statement of the business of Philo-
sophy— that it answers the three questions: "What can
I know?" "What ought I to do?" and "For what may
I hope ? " and bringing back the last two questions to the
first, he proceeds to maintain that, while that question
is distinct from the question of Science or the Sciences :
" What do I know?" it can be answered, in its different
378 HUME.
bearings, only by reference to the results of one branch of
science, namely Psychology, which investigates the actual
contents of the mind. Here are some of his sentences,,
bearing on the question of the scientific standing of Psycho-
logy :-
" Psychology is a part of the science of life or biology,
which differs from the other branches of that science merely
in so far as it deals with the psychical, instead of the
physical, phenomena of life. As there is an anatomy of the
body, so there is an anatomy of the mind : the psychologist
dissects mental phenomena into elementary states of con-
sciousness as the anatomist resolves limbs into tissues and
tissues into cells. ... As the physiologist inquires into the
way in which the so-called ' functions ' of the body are
performed, so the psychologist studies the so-called ' faculties'
of the mind. . . . On whatever ground we term physiology
science, psychology is entitled to the same appellation."
Nothing, again, could be more pointed than his rejection of
Comte's plea against the possibility of mental introspection ;
and when Hume himself — in the remarkable passage of the
Introduction to the Human Nature, where he argues for an
extension of the area of psychological observation to the
broader field of human social activity — seems for a moment
to anticipate Comte's view in a more guarded form, Pro-
fessor Huxley is immediately ready with the very pertinent
remark that " the manner in which Hume constantly refers
to the observation of the contents and the processes of his
own mind clearly shows that he has here inadvertently
overstated the case ". It is refreshing to come across one
"man of science" — and him a leader among his fellows —
who can enter so sympathetically and thoroughly into the
conditions of psychological inquiry ; and it may be hoped
that his words will not fall idly upon ears that are deaf to
voices from within the psychological camp itself. Professor
Huxley's appreciation of the scientific character of Psycho-
logy contrasts very favourably with the different opinion —
specious but hollow — to which Professor Clerk Maxwell has
lately committed himself in a bright review of a dull book
(see Nature, December 19, 1878).
THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.1
THIS is an examination of Mill's chief metaphysical positions
as set forth or implied in his different works, six topics being
selected for discussion, namely, Consciousness, Body and
Mind, Primary Qualities of Matter, Causation and Uni-
formity of Nature, Mathematical Axioms and Necessary
Truths, General Ideas. A short introductory sketch of the
historical evolution of Modern Philosophy, with a more
detailed consideration of Mill's particular Antecedents, and
a few words of Epilogue, make up the other contents of the
volume.
The author, who seems implicitly to follow Prof. Green
in philosophy, does in fact aspire to substitute plain speech
as regards Mill for his leader's method of innuendo. Shar-
ing the opinion that the English mind touched its high-
water mark in philosophy a whole century ago, he seeks to
make it good not by oblique hints but by showing the
precise particulars in which so much later a thinker as Mill,
who is thought by many and doubtless thought himself to
be more advanced, falls below the level then attained by
Hume ; and this is clearly the right way to set to work for
the spiritual good of a generation that has had the mis-
fortune to be nurtured on Mill rather than Hume. Nor, as
it happens, could the most devout believer in Mill find any
fault with the tone of his present depredator. We have
here a perfectly sober attempt from one intellectual point
of view to estimate the value of Mill's achievement from
another ; and the critic is even anxious to make plain, as far
as he can, the exact nature of his own philosophical assump-
tions, so that the reader may fairly judge the issues of the
conflict.
JBy W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., Fellow of New College, Oxford. London :
Kegan Paul & Co., 1879. Pp. 156. (Mind, iv. 421.)
380 THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.
The interest of the first part of the work lies in the sketch
of Mill's immediate antecedents. Assuming his aim to have
been the rescue of mathematics and physics from the wreck
of human knowledge wrought by Hume's perverse applica-
tion of true experientialist principles, the author finds that
he was influenced chiefly by three philosophical movements
belonging to the interval that separated him from Hume —
the Common Sense movement of Reid and his successors,
the English Psychological movement continued after Hartley
by James Mill, and the Positivist movement of Comte ;
while from the great German movement by which it be-
hoved him most to have profited, he learned nothing at all.
There is truth in the sketch, marked as it is by an honest
desire to seize the varied features of Mill's essentially
impressionable intellect, but the author seems hardly
familiar enough (at first hand) with the movements that
had, as he says, an effect on Mill to be able accurately to
appreciate its nature and extent in the different cases. As
to the fundamental assumption, no proof whatever is adduced
that Mill in trying, among other things, to give a philo-
sophical rationale of mathematics and physics, had Hume's
solvent criticism particularly in view, or was moved by any-
thing but a natural desire, in an age of scientific progress,
to apply to the explanation of the best-organised bodies of
human knowledge the theory of its origin which came down
to him through his father from Hartley, Berkeley and Locke.
There is an interesting statement of Mill's opinion on
Hume, now first disinterred by Prof. Bain in this number of
Mind (No. 15, p. 377), which at first sight may be thought
to lend a certain countenance to the view often expressed
before that Mill set himself to do in a positive constructive
spirit a work that Hume neglected for the sport of pricking
the bubbles blown by metaphysicians ; but the reference is
to the historian rather than the philosopher, or, at all
events, comes to very little, and I can find no real evidence
anywhere that he ever was much influenced one way or
another by Hume. That he should not, on the other hand,
have been at all influenced by the Kantian movement,
appears remarkable only when it is forgotten what the
actual conditions of philosophical thinking were in England
THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL. 381
during the .whole generation when he was coming to
maturity. Mill published his Logic in 1843 at the age of
37. After that time and that achievement he might and
did add one thing or another to his acquisitions, but he was
not likely to have his general philosophical view materially
changed. Now what likelihood was there of his learning
much about Kant or anything about Hegel in the earlier
years?1 Even Hamilton, in far more favourable circum-
stances, had (or' shows) almost no knowledge of Hegel and
a merely general knowledge of Kant. Because in the
present generation any junior student, without knowing
German, can make himself acquainted with the whole course
of modern German philosophy we are apt to suppose that it
was always so, and to judge unfavourably of Mill's range of
culture which did not include such knowledge ; and the
mistake is the more easily made because the time of Mill's
effective influence on his contemporaries was a good deal
later than the appearance of his Logic, and coincided with
the period of wider and widening philosophical information.
But upon any fair appreciation of the actual circumstances
of Mill's intellectual development, the most there is room
for is a feeling of regret that one who had such a power to
influence his generation should not have been familiar with
all the currents of thought that were destined to affect it.
1 There was indeed, already then, accessible in English the very
elaborate exposition of Kant's doctrine contributed to the Encyclopaedia
Londinensis in five articles (' Kant,' ' Logic,' ' Metaphysics,' ' Moral
Philosophy,' ' Philosophy ') by Thomas Wirgman from 1812 to 1825 ; but
the labours of this most enthusiastic of Kantian students are hardly
more unknown to the present generation than they seem to have been
unheeded by his contemporaries. Those who in recent years have
succeeded at last in forcing Kant iipon the attention of English readers,
apparently know nothing of the heroic efforts that were vainly spent
towards that end more than fifty years before. Mr. Mahaffy alone seems
as yet to know of his predecessor's name : see a paper on ' Kant and his
Fortunes in England,' lately contributed by him to the Princeton Review,
where he speaks in passing of " an article in the Encyc. Lond. in 1821 by
Wirgman, who was considered as an enthusiast about Kant" — apparently
referring to the article on ' Metaphysics ' (which however was published
as early as 1817). This article contains a complete translation of the
Prolegomena, much superior to the later translation by Richardson with
which Mr. Mahaffy connects his own. Wirgman's exertions deserve
some day to be fully acknowledged. He illustrated his various exposi-
tions (except the ' Metaphysics ') with copperplate diagrams that exhibit
the main doctrines of Kant's philosophy in a very striking manner.
382 THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.
And even this regret is not unmixed with satisfaction, since
the very limitations of Mill's philosophical view give it a
peculiar historical value. It is well that a serious effort
should once have been made to account for human know-
ledge and especially science from the point of view of indivi-
dualistic experience. Nor is it more remarkable that this
task should not have been attempted till the time when the
point of view was about to become discredited than it is that
the speculative spirit should have blazed up higher than ever
before in Hegel after the course of modern philosophy down
to Kant had consisted chiefly in a movement of more and
more thorough conciliation of the two opposite principles of
Reason arid Experience. If Mill's Experientialism was a
mere survival out of due season, what are we to say of
Hegel's ^Rationalism?
In his critical chapters Mr. Courtney does not make
many points against Mill that have not been made by others
before, but his points are in general clearly and always
neatly made, and the criticism may be profitably read by
anybody who is disposed to think that Mill has said the
last word on the topics in question. That the case for Ex-
perientialism quite breaks down when Mill's doctrine is
proved defective or inconsistent, is more than the author
contends for. Sometimes he even, by indicating and leav-
ing unassailed the position of later experientialists, appears
to suggest that it is rather Mill's individualism that is at
fault than the general philosophical attitude which so many
thinkers of modern times have found themselves more and
more driven to take up ; but more probably the colourless
references to later phases of Experientialism are to be un-
derstood rather as suggesting a measure of Mill's backward-
ness in relation to his age than as meaning anything in the
way of approval. Remarks like that at p. 62 — " So little
is it true that association explains thought that the reverse
is the case : it is thought which explains the possibility of
association"; or like that at p. 92 (often repeated) — "Suc-
cessive sensations can give rise to the conception of a suc-
cession of sensations only if there be a mind present to each
sensation, holding them in due relations to one another and
transforming into permanencies the perishing series of sense-
THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL. 383
impressions " ; bear in reality as much against the later and
wider as against the earlier and narrower interpretation of
Experience. And the reply, it may at once be added, which
they are most likely now-a-days to evoke from the ex-
perientialist, is simply that they must not be allowed to
interfere with the work of psychological analysis, or held to
be a bar to such theorising upon psychological data as Mill,
to the best of his lights, essayed. Their value, ever since
Kant first began to give them their current mode of expres-
sion, has lain in the warning they contain for the psycho-
logical philosopher (or philosophical psychologist) as to the
full depth of the problem of knowledge. Of themselves, they
give no insight. Are " sensations " to which a " mind " must
be present for holding them together, mental or not-mental?
If not-mental, how come they to pass into mental forms ?
If mental, then "mind" is already given in "sensation,"
and there is not anything necessary for the explanation of
knowledge beyond a full enumeration of psychological factors,
all equally phenomenal with (however otherwise different
from) so-called bare sensation. Or at all events it is only
through foregone psychological investigation, pursued in the
spirit of the positive sciences, that the philosophical ques-
tion can be determined. This is the true note of Experi-
entialism late or early.
We may select as a fair specimen of Mr. Courtney's per-
formance his discussion of Mill's view of the genesis of the
notion of Extension. Here he can directly confront Mill
with Hume, and here he is dealing with a subject that above
all others has engaged the attention of recent psychologists.
On the whole, his opinion seems to be that the later psycho-
logy leaves the question very much where it was, and that
Mill in particular, though fairly facing the great difficulty
of transforming a succession of sensations in time into an
order of co-existence in space, does in reality advance no
whit beyond Hume and is rather less deft than his artful
predecessor in covering up the weakness of the " sensationalist "
position. Unfortunately, Mr. Courtney shows, by his re-
marks and references at p. 96, that be knows next to nothing
of the later scientific investigations (chiefly German) which
nobody should now touch the question of Space without
384 THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.
having mastered ; and even as regards Hume he betrays a
certain want of intimate knowledge, or at any rate he misses
the points on which it is of real interest to make a com-
parison between him and Mill. Hume, he tells us, proposed
to derive the idea of extension from sensations of colour, but,
with characteristic cleverness, turned the mere sequence of
sense-impressions thus obtained into the required co-exist-
ence of coloured parts by quietly saying that the eye gives
the impression of coloured points disposed in a certain
manner. On the other hand, Mill, as we know, first urges
the importance of the muscular sense in conjunction with
touch for the generation of the notion of extension; but, as
he thinks that we can never thus get beyond a succession of
sensations in time, he would explain the element of co-exist-
ence in the case by having recourse at last to a power in the
eye of taking in a manifold of sensations practically at once,
the action of the ocular muscles proceeding habitually ' in a
time too short for computation '. Now whatever may be
said against the position thus taken up by Mill — and he
certainly (as it seems to me) lays himself open to the charge
of asserting something very like an original intuition of space
after all — this is to be said for him, that he seeks to allow
for the respective contributions of sight and touch to the
genesis of the notion, that he thinks of the two as having to
be somehow equated, and that he accentuates the presence
of the muscular factor in both cases ; and these, it must be
allowed, are considerable advances beyond the position of
Hume as stated by Mr. Courtney. But, in point of fact,
the position of Hume is very insufficiently stated by Mr.
Courtney. Hume does by no means overlook touch as
equally with sight a source of the idea of extension ; he
does not forget that visible and tangible extension have to
be equated (though he very coolly assumes that there is no
difficulty in the matter — as if Berkeley had never been !) ;
and he even signalises the psychological fact of a ' sensation
of motion ' (though he strangely connects it only with touch
—never with sight, and labours with a most perverse in-
genuity to prove it of no account for the genesis of the notion
of space). Not only does Mr. Courtney tell us nothing of
all this, which is just what is most interesting in any com-
THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.
parison of the two thinkers, but he even distorts the little
he does tell when he represents Hume as saying that we
obtain a " sequence " of sense-impressions by the eye — the
eye which Hume so curiously thinks of only as resting.
As regards Mill, I should like to add, in support of what was
said before, that his discussion of the psychological question
of Space in the Examination and of the corresponding philo-
sophical question in the Logic affords very conclusive evi-
dence to my mind that he was quite unfamiliar with the
remarkable discussion of the ideas of Space and Time filling
part ii. of Hume's Treatise. Surely he could never have
passed this by in total silence, if his object had been, as we
are told by the Oxford critics, to save mathematical science
from Hume's devouring maw. l
Mr. Courtney fancies he has discovered a radical incon-
sistency between Mill's positions in the Examination and
in the Logic. "The fact is," says he (p. 79), "that Mill
as an inductive logician supposes that phenomena (objective
facts) are immediately cognised by us, while Mill as a psy-
chologist, a critic of Hamilton and a metaphysician, supposes
that phenomena, the facts as immediately cognised by us,
are mere subjective presentations " ; and he says so more
particularly because of remarks like this, which to his
"amazement" he reads in the Logic — 'Propositions are
not assertions respecting our ideas of things, but assertions
respecting the things themselves'. Others in their turn
may be amazed, after all the discussion that has gone on of
late respecting ' material ' or ' matter-of-fact ' logic, that a
statement like this of Mill's should not be held to be perfectly
reconcilable with a sort of idealism : over and over again the
' matter-of-fact ' logicians have declared that, in dealing with
facts and things regarded as objective, they mean to pre-
judice in no way the ulterior metaphysical question. But
it is more to the point to remind his critic that Mill himself
1 In the Autobiography, p. 69, he mentions only the Essays (i.e., the
Inquiry) among his philosophical reading ; and it is not the Inquiry, with
its passing reference to Mathematics in a single paragraph, that can have
set him (though it set Kant from another point of view) upon defending
the reality of mathematical science. On the whole, in the absence of
external evidence, it might be doubted, upon the internal evidence,
whether Mill ever read the Treatise.
25
386 THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN STUART MILL.
knew perfectly well what he was about in speaking, as a
logician, of ' facts ' and ' things ' ; see the passage at the very
beginning of the Logic (bk. i. 2, 1) : ' When I say, The sun
is the cause of day, ... I mean that a certain physical fact,
which is called the sun's presence (and which in the ultimate
analysis resolves itself into sensations, not ideas), causes, &c.'
And the important chapter iii., ' Of the Things denoted by
Names,' which until the Examination appeared was Mill's
chief contribution to metaphysical theory (but which, by
the way, Mr. Courtney hardly touches), surely does not err
in the direction of Realism.
As a last remark, it may be noted that Mr. Courtney is
rather apt, considering the size of his work, to run away
from his subject or to come up to it only after a deal of
galloping through the centuries of philosophical thinking ;
and his statements when he is at the gallop are apt to be
looser than they need be. The "two centuries from Des-
cartes to Hegel " (p. 2) were not two, and there is consider-
able vagueness in the author's next following reference to a
" period commencing in the sixteenth century and ending
in the eighteenth," whether he means it or not to be same
as the " two centuries " just before mentioned. On p. 4,
Leibniz is oddly made to follow upon Hume ; and what
is meant by the " endless analysis of Wolff"? There is a
three-page history of the doctrine of Universals in chap. ix.
that might be more accurate ; and even the occasional re-
ferences to particular thinkers are not so precise as they
should have been if they were to be made at all. Here is
one (p. 115) : " Kant denied the Power of the individual
Self over Volition and Action, and in that sense denied Free
Will to the Ego ; on the other hand, Free Will, as shown
in Morality, is brought back again ". When Kant, in Mr.
Courtney's phrase, "brought back again" Free Will, was
it not to an "individual Self" that he ascribed it? The
assertion is led up to through some other sentences, but they
do nothing to mend it.
THE BKAIN AS AN OKGAN OF MIND.1
DR. BASTIAN has put into these seven hundred pages the
result of not a little independent thought and inquiry, besides
reproducing in a convenient form a good part of what is
generally known upon his subject. Apparently, he has not
aimed at giving a complete account of the present state of
research into " brain as an organ of mind". Even on topics
that specially occupy his attention, his information, wide
and varied though it be, is apt to fall short of the reader's
natural expectation. For example, he discusses the question
of the localisation of cerebral functions as it was left by Dr.
Ferrier in 1877, and has nothing to say on the later investi-
gations of Goltz, Munk and others. On the other hand,
there is large reference to views propounded by himself more
than ten years back, before the new era of experimental
activity began. It would seem that he has been mainly
concerned, during the whole interval, to note those particular
advances in neurological science that had a bearing on his
own earlier views. These, we may take it, are now set forth
in the present volume with full maturity of expression ; and
our interest is to understand what are the special contribu-
tions to the knowledge of mind in relation to the brain or
nervous system which so painstaking and enthusiastic a
worker as Dr. Bastian professes to have made.
The book has a certain disorderly appearance from the
way in which neurological and psychological chapters are
mixed up throughout ; and the treatment, in detail, is not in
fact as clear and orderly as it might be, especially in those more
important chapters towards the close where the threads of the
whole inquiry are drawn together. It is not very easy to make
1 By H. CHARLTOX BASTIAN, M. A., M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Pathologi-
cal Anatomy and Clinical Medicine in University College, London. With
184 Illustrations. London: Kegaii Paul, 1880. Pp<708. (Mind, vi. 120.)
388 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
out what it is exactly that Dr. Bastian does think on several of
the most vital points which he discusses there at no insuf-
ficient length ; but, as regards the book generally, there is a
definite plan running through it, as was indicated in the short
notice that he furnished to Mind, No. 19, p. 434, though no-
where clearly in the treatise itself. The plan is, after some
consideration of a nervous system and sense-organs generally
(pp. 1-69), to describe them as they appear in the lower
animals up to birds (pp. 70-137), and then, in the light of a
general consideration of mind as it can, at bottom, be known
only subjectively in man, to make the best suppositions pos-
sible as to the kind of mental life which the behaviour of
those animals appears to warrant (pp. 138-253) ; next, to
follow the same order of double treatment in the case of
quadrupeds with more particular reference to quadrumana
(pp. 254-331) ; and finally, in the latter half of the book, to
carry it out in the case of man as far as Dr. Bastian thinks
it can as yet be carried — or, at least, upon the particular lines
in which he himself is most interested,
Dr. Bastian does not tell us at the beginning, but long
before he has done says plainly enough, what he means by
Brain and Mind in calling one the organ of the other. His
views on this point, which are somewhat peculiar, claim
special attention in these pages, and will not be overlooked ;
but it will be convenient first to note the main points of
interest or importance which the exposition offers, on what
may be called the common understanding — generally accepted
by Dr. Bastian himself — of a relation subsisting between
mind and the nervous system. We may pass over the initial
considerations as to the uses and origin of a nervous system :
they are partly a reproduction of current opinions (Mr.
Spencer's and others'), partly dependent on that theory of
the origin of life with which trie author's name has become
so much identified. Touching structure, he is disposed to
regard the neuroglia as, at all events in some cases, entering
into the circuit of nerve-currents, but he has no such view of
its pervading importance as Lewes was inclined to form or
as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has (in Mind, No. 17) definitely
expressed, and he rather supposes that it is the " matrix
wherein and from which new nerve-fibres and new nerve-cells.
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 389
are evolved in animals, of whatsoever kind or degree of
organisation, during their advance in reflex, in instinctive or
in intellectual acquirements ". A third introductory chapter
deals with the use and nature of sense-organs, since these are
so predominant in the nervous systems of the lower orders
.of animals first to be studied. Here, without referring to
the manner and order of development of sense-organs as now
traced by embryological inquiry, Dr. Bastian gives a view of
the organs of special sense on the common supposition of
their being evolved from the simple form of touch ; distin-
guishing besides a class of "visceral sensations," of large
account for the animal life, as well as the so-called muscular
sense, though this last is here only mentioned in order to be
reserved for treatment at the human stage.1
The outcome of the following chapters, in which, as
before said, the author first makes a comparative survey of
the structure of the nervous system in lower animals (from
mollusks to birds) and then, in view of human self-conscious-
ness, seeks to interpret the facts recorded of their external
behaviour, is that mental life in such lower forms is mainly
sensorial and grows more complex with the increased variety
of sense-endowments. Besides adducing the evidence of
anatomical and physiological facts in support of this conclu-
sion, Dr. Bastian would contend, generally, for the measure-
ment of intelligence by sense-endowment upon the psychologi-
cal ground (c. xii., on " Sensation, Ideation and Perception,"
and elsewhere) that higher manifestations of mind can be
shown to have a relation to sense, and that the simplest
sensation (in us) can be shown to involve conscious dis-
crimination, &c. His expressions, however, seem to want
guarding for the purpose he has in view. When he broadly
asserts (p. 182) that " Sensation is, in fact, a complex rather
1 The reason given (p. 69) for the reservation is that, as ' muscular
sensations ' follow or accompany and do not of themselves incite move-
ments, they can be known only subjectively or as they are described by
our fellowmen. But, on this showing, Dr. Bastian need not confine him-
self to saying that " it is obvious we can know nothing about them among
Invertebrate Animals " : we can know as little of them in any Vertebrates
that are speechless.
On occasion of Hearing, Dr. Bastian does not omit to make reference
to the part played by the Semicircular Canals in the direction of head and
•other movements.
390 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
than a simple mental process : it is invariably compounded
of Cognition and Feeling," one would like to know from him,
with some explicitness, what then is to be taken as " simple "
in the mental life of the lower animals. Perhaps c. xi., on
" Reflex Action and Unconscious Cognition," is meant to
supply part of the answer to this question, but as the Cogni-
tion there spoken of is mere "organic discrimination'' we
are still left to seek.
At the farther staga of his double line of exposition, when
he reaches the anthropoid apes, Dr. Bastian finds such un-
mistakable evidences of intelligence and emotion (like ours)
connected with or growing out of their still more varied
sense-experience, that he cannot suppress the exclamation,
what might their mental advancement not become if only
they could help each other forward, in generation after
generation, by that means of articulate speech which, in a
later chapter entitled " From Brute to Human Intelligence "
(somewhat oddly thrust into the midst of his account of the
structure of the human brain), he signalises as the distinctive
instrument of mental development in man. Other points in
the chapters devoted to the lower animals we must here pass
by; remarking on the sketch of animal psychology as a whole
that, however interesting and suggestive, there is either too
much or too little of it — too little for an effective under-
standing of the particular subject, too much in relation to
the general drift of the book.
Coming to the chapters that deal expressly with man, we
have first, in a hundred or more pages, a view of the pre-
natal development, of the size and weight, of the external
configuration and of the internal structure of the human
brain. Here Dr. Bastian, at various points of his full and
careful exposition, has results of original anatomical research
to bring forward, though not of a kind that need detain us.
It is from c. xxiv. (p. 477) onwards that more detailed notice
becomes necessary. . Chapter xxiv. professes to deal with the
functional relations of the principal parts of the brain. It
hardly carries out the promise of its title. There is first an
ingenious speculation as to how the cross-relation between
the cerebral hemispheres and the lateral halves of the body
may have arisen — where it first is manifest — in fishes and
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 891
become more pronounced in the higher classes of animals.
Then follows a section on the functional relations of the
cerebral hemispheres which seeks to throw light on " the
duality of body and unity of rnind " ; but with no par-
ticular result. Dr. Bastian can only say (p. 485) that while
the great commissure, the corpus callosum, seems more
obviously to correlate the sensorial regions of the two hemi-
spheres, it must also be supposed to connect mediately the
emotional, intellectual and volitional regions ; for is there
not " manifestly a unity in our emotional, intellectual and
volitional, as well as in our sensorial consciousness"?
Observations of that kind or such as otherwise make up this
section carry us a very little way. Finally, in the chapter,
there is presented a rather careful digest of the manifold
views that have been held as to the structural relations and
functions of the cerebellum ; but when Dr. Bastian proceeds
to state his own comprehensive view which shall include all
the portions of truth contained in any of the others, it is
done in words that suggest more questions than they answer:
" The cerebellum is a supreme motor centre for reinforcing
and for helping to regulate the qualitative and quantitative
distribution of outgoing currents, in voluntary and automatic
actions respectively ; or, more briefly still, it is a supreme
organ for the reinforcement and regulative distribution of
outgoing currents ". How the cerebellum works in relation
to the corpora striata, which at a later stage are made of
more account for the effecting of movements, is not in any
way suggested.1 Altogether, there is not much to be learned
about " the functional relations of the principal parts of the
brain " from this chapter.
1 At the later place, p. 586, he can only say : " The corpora striata con-
jointly with the cerebellum are doubtless specially called into activity by
the cerebral cortex, in ways which are most important though they cannot
be precisely denned". The statement, p. 508, that "the cerebellum may
be regarded as an enormously developed supreme motor centre ': is not
easily reconciled, so far as the word ' supreme ' is concerned, with what is
later said of the corpora striata. Nor, in face of Dr. Bastian's account of
Instinct in c. xiv., is it easy to understand the force of his remark about
the cerebellum on pp. 509-10 : " That it should appear to have nothing
to do with Instinct . . . notwithstanding the fact that it is a recipient
of fibres from all kinds of ' sensory ' nuclei, is as much in harmony with
reason as with experiment — in view of the reflex functions which have
been assigned to it".
392 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
In the next chapter, "Phrenology: Old and New," Dr.
Bastian begins to draw more definitely to conclusions.
Here, after a historical sketch of earlier theories of locali-
sation of mental functions, he subjects to special review Dr.
Ferrier's allocation of the different senses to particular
regions of the cortical substance of the hemispheres. He
seems willing to grant that Dr. Ferrier may have detected
parts of the brain-surface that are specially involved in the
action of the five senses, but he protests vigorously against
the notion that the work of each sense is transacted at the
particular spot or " centre " assigned. The truer notion of
" perceptive centres," he very reasonably maintains, is that
which he himself had long before suggested — widely-diffused
and interlacing (though still always definite) complexes of
cells and fibres. In the matter of detail, he objects also to
the supposition hazarded by Dr. Ferrier that the centre for
visceral sensations may be in the occipital lobes. The occi-
pital lobes, being later evolved, are, he urges, least of all
likely to be concerned in a class of sensations that count for
so much in the mental experience of the lower animals, but
must rather be supposed to subserve the higher intellectual
functions.
It is in this chapter too that Dr. Bastian first expressly
brings forward his doctrine of the ' Muscular sense,' though
it has to be filled in from supplementary passages scattered
through succeeding chapters and from a small-type appen-
dix of some ten pages devoted to a critical survey of opinion
upon this vexed topic. The subject is one of those which
Dr. Bastian took up at an earlier time and on which he now
seeks formally to recapitulate his previously published views,
which, in the main, time has only strengthened for him.
Brought together from this place or that, his chief points
maybe shortly stated thus. There is no 'muscular sense'
as the name for an original kind of simple experience had in
the fact of impulse being sent outwards from the brain to
the muscles by motor nerves (as Bain, Wundt and others
agree more or less in supposing). A muscular act must
first be proceeding at the periphery before there can be any
question of our becoming sensible of it, ani we do become
thus sensible through ingoing impressions by afferent nerves
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 393
alone — without any backward currents in the motor nerves
also (as Lewes was inclined to suppose). But the ingoing
impressions by afferent nerves are not only to be set down
to the head of touch or the related common sensibility (as
Ferrier and others suppose). Besides conscious impressions
from the skin overlying the muscles, or from deeper-seated
parts connected with the muscles, or from the muscles
themselves, there are other unfelt impressions " which guide
the motor activity of the brain by automatically bringing
it into relation with the different degrees of contraction of
all muscles that may be in a state of action ". These last,
which Dr. Bastian formerly supposed to pass inwards by
afferent fibres from the spinal motor cells (short of the
muscles), he now thinks are sent inwards from the muscles
themselves, equally with the conscious impressions that come
therefrom. That they must be allowed for as an independent
element in so-called ' muscular sense ' is proved for him by
pathological cases in which, though both superficial and
deeper sensibility were normally present, the power of co-
ordinating movements was lost when the eyes were shut.
And, generally, it is by interpretation of pathological cases
that he is led to maintain each of the foregoing positions.
Taking account of all the various elements together, he
prefers to speak of them as making up a complex " Sense of
Movement " or Kincesthesis which must be supposed to
have its diffuse ' centre ' in the brain like other senses ; though
the " kinaesthetic impressions" are in this always peculiar
that they are results — not, like other sense-impressions,
•causes — of movement. None the less, though they do not
initiate movements — only guide in the keeping up of move-
ments once begun — he thinks they may in the ' ideal ' form
be equally effective with other sensations in initiating the
acts called ' ideo-motor'.
Deferring remarks upon any part of this doctrine, let us
first follow Dr. Bastian in his next two chapters which may
be said to complete his view of cerebral action : they are
entitled, respectively, "Will and Voluntary Movements"
and " Cerebral Mental Substrata ". If, in the matter of
sensory centres, he can accept Dr. Ferrier's results as
partially true, he is wholly opposed to that investigator's
394 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
complementary conception of ' motor centres '. Those
limited areas of the convolutions bounding the fissure of
Rolando whence Ferrier supposes that conscious voluntary
impulses are sent out to this or that muscular organ, are, in
Dr. Bastian's view, not to be called 'motor' at all, but, if
anything, 'sensory' like the others lying farther behind. He
takes up this position mainly on the ground of a general
analysis of the process of volition. Voluntary action, he finds,,
is such as is determined by an intellectual stimulus only
more complex than in ideo-motor action, and represents
nothing in the way of conscious experience but what may
be expressed in terms of sensation or ideation. To posit
under the name of ' motor centres ' special parts of the
cortical substance for a function undistinguishable from
what is elsewhere called ' sensory,' is therefore unwarranted.
Dr. Bastian is of opinion that nothing can properly be called
' motor centre ' higher than the corpora striata (and cere-
bellum), that the fibres running downwards from the cortex
to the corpora striata are as strictly internuncial . as those
interposed between any sensory and any motor ganglion in
lower centres,, and that the cortical substance itself is wholly
used up for 'sensory' purposes, meaning perception, ideation,.
&c. Without committing himself expressly, he evidently
leans to the supposition that Ferrier's cortical ' motor
centres ' may be more especially involved in the reception of
that class of impressions which he calls kinaesthetic, or at
least that portion of them (felt or mi felt) that are not properly
tactile and traceable to the presumed centre for touch
situated in quite another region. And whatever difficulty
there may be in imagining such an oddly dislocated struc-
ture as Dr. Bastian's " kinsesthetic centre " would then
become, it must be allowed that he tries to proceed with
much more consistency than Dr. Ferrier ; who, after scouting
the notion of a muscular sense distinct from touch and
common sensibility, cannot describe the general working of the
brain without speaking of his ' motor centres ' in terms which
imply the existence of ' muscular sense ' in the most pro-
nounced form contended for by Bain or Wundt. Dr. Bastian
remarks this inconsistency in Ferrier (p. 599), and it can
have escaped no attentive reader oi.Tlic Functions of the Brain.
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 395
Bat we may now see that Dr. Bastian, much as he strives
to the contrary, perhaps cannot help falling into what is
radically the same kind of inconsistency. As far as his
general conception of brain-action can be made out from the
three chapters last referred to, he seems now to make JCinces-
thesis of no account at all for mental processes, since they may
go on perfectly well without it, and now to interpolate it as a
necessary link between the other senses arid movement in
a way that practically amounts to the whole function ever
claimed for ' muscular sense '. If, as he supposes, muscular
action must first be in actual process at the periphery
before there can be any sense of it — or, as he otherwise puts
the supposition, if Mncesthesis is always result, not cause,
of movement — then movement in the human system cannot
well be thought to be kept up or "guided" under other
conditions than those from which it sprang, and these are
supplied by passive sensibility, special or common. If
kincesthesis, then, is of no account in the case of actual
movement — if it is no source of sensori-motor action — how
is it to become the source, as Dr. Bastian declares it, of ideo-
motor action ? The ' idea ' (to use Dr. Bastian's term) of
a sensation, like sound or colour, which regularly initiates
movement can easily be understood to initiate movement
also, but how is an ' idea ' of movement to become a cause
of movement when a sensation of movement is not a cause
of movement but only a result ? On the other hand, if it
be the fact, as Dr. Bastian in general maintains, that
voluntary action, and ideo-motor action, involving an ' idea '
of the movement to be carried out, are more immediately
started from the " kinaesthetic centres," then must the
condition of these correspondent with such ' idea ' stand in a
very different relation to the state of the system during
actual movement from that in which the condition (say)
of the auditory centre correspondent with an ' idea ' of
sound stands to the condition of the same centre in the case
of actual sensation. Now this radical difference is what
Bain and Wundt seek to convey when they oppose ' muscular
sense ' or ' feelings of innervation ' to all modes of ' passive
sensation '. The only way, in fact, to escape positing such
a difference of conscious experience with the difference of
396 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
nervous attitude is to deny that there is any sense or ex-
perience whatever in connexion with muscular activity first
or last.
The subject cannot, on this occasion, be pursued farther,
but it must be added that, in any case, Dr. Bastian's " Sense
of Movement" is inadmissible as a substitute for 'muscular
sense'. However unsatisfactory this term may be, it is
intended to mark something very different from what the
proposed substitute pointedly conveys. The ' muscular
sense,' whatever be its precise physiological conditions — as
involving ingoing currents or not — is the name for a kind of
simple mental experience presumed to accompany the in-
nervation of muscles. Th6 experience is not of the muscles
as innervated or of the objective consequences that follow —
sometimes apparent movements of limbs, &c., sometimes
strain without apparent movement. When " movement "
as such is subjectively apprehended by us, the experience is
of a very complex perceptual order, not to be expressed by
the term "sense," even though the fundamental factor of
the experience may be supplied by the so-called muscular
sense : there is involved also an intuition of space (no
matter whether original or derived) with much else besides.
So far, therefore, from promoting the settlement of the
question as to the physiological conditions of the various
kinds of simple sense-experience, Dr. Bastian indefinitely
complicates the problem by his "Sense of Movement " or
new-fangled kincesthesis. The like objection is to be made
to his occasional use of the term " Space-sense " borrowed
from De Cyon.
The remainder of Dr. Bastian's work — still nearly a hun-
dred pages — is mostly taken up with the question of Lan-
guage (spoken and written), treated in the light and for the
confirmation of his general doctrine of brain-action. Here,
once more, he but expounds in a maturer shape views set
forth "in embryo" before. The subject is treated in full
detail from the pathological side, and as an attempt to
discriminate and classify, upon definite principles of physio-
logy and psychology, a great variety of morbid affections
that are apt to be confounded, the long c. xxix. (pp. 613-72),
on " The Cerebral Kelations of Speech and Thought," is
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 897
worthy of all praise. Even the next and concluding chapter
of all, while professing to set out " further problems in re-
gard to the localisation of higher cerebral functions," is
almost entirely devoted to a summary of results concerning
the function of Speech. With any other of the questions
involved in an assertion of thorough-going relation between
mind and brain Dr. Bastian does not attempt to grapple.
He gives as a reason for so abstaining, that it is hopeless to
proceed with any of them till the question of speech is
determined ; but, though this is plausibly said, more es-
pecially in view of his repeated declaration that all higher
mental action depends on speech, and though he deserves
thanks for doing his best upon the one question which his
experience as a physician enables him to treat with some
thoroughness, his limitation of the inquiry has the inevitable
effect of making his volume, for all its length, a rather
imperfect treatise on the subject which it professes to
handle. There are other questions, perhaps not less man-
ageable than that of speech, for example — to mention but
one — that of Attention as raised in Wundt's Physiologische
Psychologic in 1875, and just touched by Dr. Ferrier in 1877,.
which should hardly be passed altogether by in a bulky
volume that proposes to treat of mind in relation to brain
in the year 1880. Evidently, as before said, Dr. Bastian
has been less concerned to write a fairly exhaustive work up
to date than to bring together a large quantity of varied
materials bearing upon those few aspects of his subject in
which he happens to take a special interest.
It still remains to see how Dr. Bastian conceives of Brain
and of Mind as related to one another in the way of organ
and function. The point is first distinctly brought forward
in c. x. on " The Scope of Mind," and his deliverance there
is often repeated afterwards in such terms as these : The
organ of mind is "that portion only of the nervous system
which has to do with the reception, the transmission and
with the vastly multiplied co-ordination of 'ingoing currents'
in all kinds of nerve-centres " ; it does not include any part
concerned in the transmission of the ' outgoing current '
downwards from the cortical substance of the hemispheres.
The reason he generally gives for such limitation is the total
398 THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
absence, as we have seen upon his view, of all conscious
experience in connexion with the emission of impulse to
muscles ; though-, even if this were the fact, the reason
might hardly be sufficient, in view of the declarations we
shall presently hear from him as to the nature of mind.
Accepting it, however, we are still in a difficulty. If all
structures leading downwards and outwards from the cortex
are upon this ground no part of the organ of mind, neither,
it would seem, can the afferent lines of the system be any
part of that organ, since of (or rather with) any process
going on in them short of the cortex there is also no conscious
experience. Or, if it be said that the afferent lines are part
of the organ because the cortical processes (wherewith we
are conscious) are excited through them, surely the like
must be said of the efferent lines also, when it is not other-
wise than through these that the " movement takes place
of which there is afterwards a kina3sthetic impression''.
Dr. Bastian indeed, in his eagerness (as we may suppose) to
be rid of a particular doctrine of the ' muscular sense,' does
not hesitate at one place to say that " the processes of
motor centres seem to lie even more truly outside the
sphere of mind than the molecular processes comprised in
the actual contraction of a muscle," since these latter " are
at least immediately followed by ' ingoing ' impressions,
whilst so far as we know — that is, so far as any evidence
exists — the former are not " (p. 600). Now, there is of
course a sense in which anybody may allow that the muscles,
interposed as they naturally are between the peripheral ends
of the fibres that run from and the fibres that run to the
brain, are a part of the organ of mind. But so long as there
is a meaning in speaking of the brain and nerves as compos-
ing one ' system ' implicated with the mental life, it is idle
to speak of the muscles which lie external to it as having a
closer organic relation to mind than the whole motor side of
the system has. " The division of the nervous system into
brain, spinal cord and sympathetic system," Dr. Bastian
urges with another purpose (p. 151), "is one which, though
justifiable enough on anatomical grounds, is much less so
from a physiological point of view — the nervous system is
really one and indivisible." It is odd then to read im-
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. WJ
mediately afterwards of "certain reservations" that must
be made, so that only " almost the whole nervous system "
•can be regarded as (in the widest sense) the organ of mind.
There is peril in attempting to limit and distinguish thus
without the semblance of a principle.
As to Mind, Dr. Bastian is mainly concerned, in dealing
with its "Scope," to find an expression which shall represent
it as not limited to conscious experience, without the awk-
wardness (or worse) of resorting to the use of contradictory
compounds like 'unconscious sensation,' &c. First, however,
he begins by dwelling upon the peculiarity of our knowledge
of mind — that it starts from and always involves the data
•of direct subjective consciousness, and he is so little disposed
to make light of these as to declare (in a truly philosophical
spirit) that, " strictly speaking, all knowledge whatsoever of
any other natural phenomena is still but the expression and
the summation of our own conscious states ".. At the same
time he vehemently protests against the notion that Mind is
the name of " something having an actual independent ex-
istence— an entity". "The term Mind," he says, "no more
corresponds to a definite self-existing principle than the
word Magnetism ; " and apparently he finds nothing in his
philosophical interpretation of " natural phenomena," cited
in the last sentence but one, to keep him from adding that
"conscious states . . . are dependent upon the properties
and 'molecular activities of nerve -tissues, just as (!) magnetic
phenomena are dependent upon the properties and molecular
actions of certain kinds or states of iron ". It is this notion
of an independent entity, he declares, that entails the error
of supposing Mind and Consciousness to be commensurate,
and though the grounds of the consequence are not made
very clear, let it be noted as Dr. Bastian's conviction, in
passing. As said before, his main concern then becomes to
fix the notion of mind or mental phenomena as more ex-
tensive than conscious experience and to do this in a less
contradictory way "than by speaking of unconscious feeling
and the like ; and the aim is distinctly meritorious, even
though, elsewhere in his book, he may be as ready as
another to use the very compounds he condemns.
In point of fact the difficulty is solved by being, as
400 THE BEAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND.
Hamilton would have said, ' eviscerated '. The question
presents itself to Dr. Bastian more especially in this form :
Mind as we are subjectively conscious of it appears as "a
mere imperfect, disjointed, serial agglomeration of feelings,"
£c., while the nervous processes upon which we have reason
to believe these disconnected feelings, &c., are dependent are
parts of one great continuous complex ; must we not then
suppose that mind is more than the broken series of feelings,
&c.. that we are conscious of, and should we not suppose the
unconscious states to be something else than "feelings "or
the like, which are conscious states '? The answer is that
the name Mind should and must be enlarged so as to cover
along with conscious states, dependent as these are on
nerve-actions, "other mere unconscious nerve-actions which
are contributory to, rather than directly associated with, con-
scious states " (p. 150) — provided always (pp. 148, 9) these
be not outgoing currents. Sometimes Dr. Bastian's ex-
pression is so far different that instead of "nerve-actions"
he says "results" of nerve-actions; but that he means
nothing but objective nerve-processes or "bodily conditions"
is proved by his arguing (pp. 149-50) that the objection to
coupling such with conscious states under the one head
of Mind is based upon our ignorance of the true relation
between subjective states and nerve-processes. Are not
motions, he goes' on to say (recurring at this pinch to the
philosophical point of view), after all known to us only in
terms of feeling? And who is to declare that there is (as
he puts the point more plainly on p. 608) " no kinship be-
tween states of consciousness and nerve-actions " ? All
which appears to come to one or other of two things — either
that in dealing with Mind there must be no reference to the
nervous system or brain at all but only to certain different
kinds of feeling; or that we may assume nerve-processes
(always excepting outgoing currents) to be mental occur-
rences as much and in exactly the same sense as any state
of which we are subjectively conscious. The one alternative
cannot suit Dr. Bastian desiring to write about Brain as
an Organ of Mind from the point of view of the positive
sciences. The other can hardly seem -to anybody a step
towards clearness of scientific vision. Leaving aside his
THE BRAIN AS AN ORGAN OF MIND. 401
philosophical considerations as irrelevant to the question in
hand, we get from Dr. Bastian a solution which simply con-
fuses that distinction of subjective and objective occurrences
upon which the phenomenal treatment of Mind is based.
Why too does Dr. Bastian, from the ground whereon he
places himself, make in the closing words of his treatise
(p. 690) that protest against the doctrine of so-called Autom-
atism— that it is " one in which all notions of Free-will,
Duty and Moral Obligation would seem ... to be alike
consigned to a common grave, together with the underlying
powers of self-education and self-control " ? If he is sure of
one thing, first or last, it is that while conscious states may
be "a mere imperfect, disjointed, serial agglomeration,"
there is throughout life an unbroken continuity of nervous
processes. The very purpose of his book is to show that
whatever may be included under Mind (which with him is
no more an independent entity than Magnetism), it can all
be expressed as function of a material organism. Nay, on
the very last page but one, when he is leading up to his
solemn conclusion, he has it that " just as it is the very
material motions on which Heat depends which do the
work ascribed to Heat, so do the very material motions on
which Consciousness or Feeling depends do the work which
we ascribe to Feeling ". How then does his own position
differ from so-called (miscalled) Automatism ? Let him
show us how he more than the ' Automatists ' can rescue
"Free- will" from the tomb. As for "Duty and Moral
Obligation," it is somewhat late in the day to speak of them
as kept alive by any particular theory of mind.
On the whole Dr. Bastian cannot be said to have written
a satisfying book. Still he has written one that is full of
the most varied information, collected with unwearied
diligence and no common earnestness of purpose ; he has
propounded a general theory of brain-action which displays
a much juster appreciation of the complexity of the facts
than some other theories in vogue ; and his psychological
observations, while always based upon solid study, not
seldom give evidence of remarkable insight. Psychologists
would do well to have the book by them for reference on
many subjects.
•26
BEEKELEY.1
THOUGH Prof. Fraser can truly describe this volume
as " an attempt to present for the first time Berkeley's
philosophic thought in its organic unity," he does not now
for the first time put forward the conception upon which it
proceeds. This is that Berkeley, in his first as in his last
works, was concerned always to establish a general philo-
sophical conclusion as to the relation of finite minds to the
Infinite Mind, and is misrepresented when special im-
portance is attached to the particular psychological doctrines
by which he began to indicate the philosophical position.
Prof. Fraser suggested his view in the plainest possible
manner before when, in his handy Selections, he placed the
full text of the Principles of Human Knoivledge before a
reprint of the earlier Theory of Vision from which several
points of psychological interest were omitted ; and, further,
when, in a second edition, he made way for a fuller exposition
of Berkeley's philosophical standing, by withdrawing just
those of his original extracts from the Vindication of the
Theory that are of real psychological importance, as giving
precision to the looser argument of the Theory. Nor, on
these earlier occasions, did he merely suggest his view of
the subordinate account that should be made of the psycho-
logical part of Berkeley's writings. He expressed himself
as strongly in this sense before as he now does anywhere in
the present volume.
The view is, of course, perfectly well justified, and Prof.
Fraser could hardly adopt any other in a work that aims at
presenting the general characteristics of Berkeley as a
philosophical thinker. Yet it is well to note why there
1 By A. CAMPBELL FRASER, LL.D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics
in the University of Edinburgh. (" Philosophical Classics for English
Readers.") Edinburgh and London : Blackwood, 1881. Pp. 234.
(Mind, vi. 421.)
WEUKELEY. 403
should have been so strong a tendency to give prominence
to the psychological first-fruits of Berkeley's inquisitive
spirit, that his name remains associated with a theory of
vision as much as with the doctrine of immaterialism which
early and late he was above all concerned to enforce. It
can only be due to the thoroughly scientific manner in which
he singled out a special psychological question and proceeded
to answer it. That he solved as well as raised the ques-
tion has been much too hastily asserted by Mill and others ;
but, while at the least he made determinate advances to-
wards its settlement, nothing can rob him of the distinction
of having been the first to mark it out in the positive spirit
of the scientific psychologist. Though he himself calls it a
question of "philosophy" (Vindication, § 43)^ his opposition
of it as such to the related questions in " geometry " and
" anatomy " would leave no doubt that he means here by
philosophy exactly what we now understand as psychology,
even if, in an earlier paragraph of the Vindication (§ 17), he
had not formally protested against his opponent's reference
"to unknown substances, external causes, agents, or powers,"
instead of to "ideas" or the simple facts of conscious ex-
perience. His treatment of visual perception should be
compared with the best work that had been done before him
011 the subject, as by Descartes, if the full measure of his
scientific advance is to be understood.1 Locke had mean-
1 This is not, however, the opinion of Descartes' latest expositor, Mr.
Mahaffy, who writes thus in the volume he has contributed to this same
series of "Philosophical Classics": — "How far he [Descartes] was in
advance of his day may be seen from the 6th Discourse [of the Dioptric],
in which he explains the perception of distance, and lays down explicitly
all the arguments and illustrations used long afterwards by Berkeley in his
Theory of Vision. It is impossible that Berkeley can have been ignorant
of Descartes' Dioptric, and yet how he could claim any originality what-
ever on the subject is passing strange. The convergence of the optical
axes, and how this may be supplied by successive observations with a
single eye, the varying colour of the objects, the greater dimness, the
number and kind of intervening objects, the uncertainty of all these
various indices — all this, which Berkeley urged, is found in Descartes'
Discourse ; nay, even the illustration of the moon looking larger near the
horizon than when high in the heavens." (Descartes, p. 150.)
What is "passing strange" is how Mr. Mahaffy can have so written.
It certainly is, as he says, " impossible that Berkeley can have been
ignorant of Descartes' Dioptric '. Berkeley may be said to have had it
for his first object just to overturn the doctrine that he found there. In
section after section of the Theory, when he is stating the opinion of the
404 BERKELEY.
while given a psychological turn to men's thought, though
himself little concerned about merely psychological con-
clusions ; and, as evidence of the influence exerted on so
many generations of English thinkers since, nothing is more
significant than that the first of Locke's successors, even less,
inclined as his religious purpose made him to stop short at
psychology, should have carefully kept back the general philo-
sophical conclusions which he had already matured, till he had
first shown the world what kind of particular question in
mental science could be resolved by the new way of " ideas "..
Though making light of its more immediate import, Prof.
Fraser gives at least a general statement of the fundamental
arguments of the Theory of Vision. He is not in the same
way careful to do the like for the argument, again psychologi-
cal, which Berkeley places in the forefront of the Principles
and declares to be so all-important in its bearings on the
philosophical conclusion of the treatise. Berkeley's explana-
tion of generality in knowledge has had too much rather than
" optic writers " before proceeding to refute them, it is plain that he has
Descartes1 own exposition rather than any other (such as Malebranche's)
in view. Take, for example, § 19, where he says- — "I know it is a re-
ceived opinion that, by altering the disposition of the eyes, the mind
perceives whether the angle of the optic axes, or the lateral angles com-
prehended between the interval of the eyes or the optic axes, are made
greater or lesser ; and that, accordingly, by a kind of natural geometry
it judges the point of their intersection to be nearer or farther off". If
there could be any doubt that Berkeley has here in view the passage in
Descartes' Dioptric, vi. 13, where occur the words "exgeometria quadani
omnibus innata," the point is settled by his quoting it in a supplementary
note to the second edition (1710) of the Theory. Descartes, besides, is
twice mentioned by name in the Theory — once in connexion with that
very subject of the low moon out of which Mr. Mahaffy makes his climax.
But the serious thing is not that Mr. Mahaffy should have hastily charged
Berkeley with ignoring Descartes : it is that he should have represented
Berkeley and Descartes' doctrines as being the same. Berkeley's
manifold references or allusions to Descartes are all, as said before, with
a view to refutation. If he refers to all or any of the points mentioned
by Mr. Mahaffy, it is to show that their true import had been quite
misunderstood by Descartes and others — that the facts need to be inter-
preted as "ideas," i.e., psychologically, if they are to have any significance
for the real question of vision. This is the true Berkeleyan note, and
there is hardly a trace of it in Descartes' chapter vi. It may be added
that Mr. Mahaffy is particularly unfortunate in his climax. Not only
was the question of the moon OD the horizon discussed, as Berkeley
himself notes, by Gassendi, Hobbes, and others, as well as by Descartes ;
but if there is one solution more than another that he is concerned to
explode it is just Descartes' (as it had been more recentlv revived by
Wallis).
BERKELEY. 405
too little importance attached to it ever since Hume con-
founded it with his own nominalism ; and his ardent polemic
against " abstract ideas " proves, upon closer inspection, to
have really very little to do with the question between
materialism and immaterialism as he argues it in the body of
the work. All the same, it is a rather serious omission on
Prof. Eraser's part to have made no reference to the negations
or assertions of Berkeley upon the subject.1 Berkeley's own
vehemence of statement is hardly to be understood save on
the supposition that he thought he had made something like
a psychological discovery and was bent on setting it forth.
It was truly no great matter ; his notion of generalisation
applying only to a very limited class of cases, and his point,
such as it was, being made at the sacrifice of such insight into
the function of language as had begun to be gained by Hobbes
and Locke. But it is interesting to see how pertinaciously
psychological Berkeley could be on occasion. Whatever
else he was, they have not erred who rank him with the
psychological thinkers of modern days.
It is needless to dwell on other points in Prof. Fraser's
exposition. Nobody could write 011 Berkeley with such
fulness of knowledge or could well have used his knowledge
to better purpose within the narrow limit assigned. Chapter
ii., dealing with " Locke on Ideas and their Causes," for the
understanding of Berkeley's start, may just be mentioned as
particularly effective. Not less so, in another kind, is the
concluding chapter, which draws out the issues of Berkeley's
thought in the light of later philosophy. The new bio-
graphical matter upon which Prof. Fraser has been able
to draw — about eighty letters from Berkeley to Sir John
Percival, afterwards Earl of Egmont, running from 1709 to
1730 — tells something of the reception awarded to the new
doctrine on its first appearance. It also for ever disposes of
the legend of Malebranche's death. Berkeley, writing from
Paris in Nov., 1713, speaks of being about to see Father Male-
branche, but he is now proved to have been in England
when the aged Oratorian, some two years later, died.
1 There is just the faintest allusion to it at p. 53, and, again, at p. 60.
Two casual references long afterwards (pp. 192-3), in a different connexion,
will convey no meaning to the reader who does not know Berkeley at
first hand.
THE HISTOKY OF PSYCHOLOGY.1
THIS book is too full of matter for detailed criticism in
present circumstances, but there should at least be no more
delay in following up the brief notices already given of its
two parts, as they appeared, with some more adequate
account of the kind of •instruction which it makes the first
systematic attempt to furnish to students of psychological
science. In the author's view, Psychology has now reached
a critical stage in its course, when future progress depends
not least upon a true understanding of the path, or paths,
it has hitherto traversed. It has at last, after whatever
devious wanderings and changing fortunes, following upon
the early start it got from Aristotle, won recognition as an
independent science in the modern sense, and, if it is hence-
forth to be pursued without more interference from meta-
physical speculation than any other science must submit to,
its past history dannot be too closely scanned in or out of
relation to general philosophy. Of historical consideration
applied to psychological notions there has, of course, been
as little lq,ck as to philosophical thought in general. Zeller
is there, for the ancient world, with his mine of psycho-
logical as of other information, as indeed no historian of
philosophy, whether on the wider or narrower scale, can
avoid making mind the very first of his topics. Neither
have some of the more distinguished among recent psycho-
logists neglected the help to be got from historical con-
sideration ; W. Volkmann especially, in his comprehensive
Lehrbuch der Psychologie, having displayed extraordinary
research of this kind in illustration of his own scientific
1 Gcschichte, der Psychologie. Von Dr. HERMANN SIEBECK, Professor der
Philosophic an der Universitat Basel (1880), Giessen (1884). Erster Theil,
Abth. 1 : "Die Psychologic vor Aristoteles " ; Abth. 2: "Die Psychologie
von Aristoteles xu Thomas von Aquino ". Gotha : Perthes, 1880, 1884.
Pp. xviii., 284 ; xi., 531. (Mind, x. 289.)
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. 407
positions. But History of Psychology, as a continuous
tracing of the whole conception men have struggled from
the beginning to form of the mental life they distinguish
within their being, as yet there has been none. This is the
deficiency which Prof. Siebeck here sets himself to supply.
It is not surprising that in such a first effort he limits the
field of view by taking no account of Oriental ideas except
in so far as, at different times, they can be proved to have
directly influenced Western inquiry ; but, with the help of
recent investigation of human origins, he does not fail, in a
general introduction (pp. 1-29), to begin the story from long
before the time of systematic reflexion. An "anthropo-
logical monism " — which recognises, but leaves aside for
philosophical consideration, the transcendent aspect of con-
sciousness, and confines itself to the facts of psychical and
psychophysical experience in their positive relations — is, in
his view, the outcome of the more developed psychological
activity of the present century, prefigured at every earlier
stage according as the research was conducted in a scientific
spirit, and by nobody so decidedly as by Aristotle. The
goal, however, has been approached or reached from an
original position of crude (objective) dualism. Man, in the
earliest dawn of thought, has everywhere been regarded as
a compound of two separable beings, soul and body, one
within the other — a conception, as the author well urges
(pp. 6, 7), suggested in the natural course of waking-
experience, and not only by the intermittent phenomena of
dreaming or the supreme crisis of death. The problem,
then, is to understand how, when express inquiry began in
Ionia some six centuries B.C., it has tended by whatever
variety of ways towards the actual result.
The whole exposition will fall into three main divisions,
of which but one is yet completed in the two sections of the
present volume. Vol. iii. is reserved for the mass of scientific
work that, in this century, has followed the critical investiga-
tion of Kant. In vol. ii. the modern movement till the end
of last century will be traced from its first beginnings within
the Middle Age — in Eoger Bacon after Arab initiative towards
positive inquiry, in the Nominalists and even in Duns Scotus.
So much of mediaeval thought being still left over, Thomas
408 THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY.
is made the final term of the present volume, because in him
the Aristotelian doctrine attained its utmost development
— in accommodation to the Christian scheme of life which
Europe had meanwhile adopted, but still in professed agree-
ment with the conceptions of the master who first gave definite
form to psychological science. Within the volume, the special
work of the historian is to show how the decisive achievement
of one man was prepared by the various labours of many
before him, and affected all later thought about mind for at
least 1500 years. In the execution of this task nothing is
more noteworthy than the author's width of survey, beyond
the conventional lines of treatment. Thus, in the period
after Aristotle, great prominence is given to Galen, whose
influence, as regards all that concerned the physiological
conditions of mental life, superseded Aristotle's own, and
remained predominant till Harvey'^ discovery prepared the
way for a truer conception of nervous function ; but also at
the preliminary stage Prof. Siebeck is able to trace with effect,
in what is reported of earliest medical work, the opening of
more than one vein of later psychological theory. And of
the plan of treatment generally, it may be said that it displays
a judicious tempering of regard for mere chronological order
with topical consideration. Whether he is dealing with
single thinkers of critical importance, like Plato and Aristotle,
or with periods in which multitudes of lesser men carried
forward the inquiry upon this line or that, the author makes
such a division of subjects as that effective comparison of the
state of psychological knowledge at the different stages is
always possible. Mention should also be made of two
chapters of special importance (ii. 130-60, 331-42), in which
the development of the notions of " Vital Spirit" (Pneuma)
and " Consciousness " is continuously set forth at those points
of the history when, after long elaboration, they acquired the
deeper significance which they were destined to receive and
thenceforth retained.
Aristotle, as the central figure, naturally takes the largest
space (115 pp., followed by a dozen pages more of summary
criticism). Through him Psychology became definitely con-
stituted as a special science on a basis of positive observation ;
for, though in modern times it has had again to conquer a
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. 409
place among the new divisions of knowledge, nothing is so
remarkable as Aristotle's anticipations of the most advanced
doctrine as to its scope and method. By comparison with
the natural sciences in their positive form, psychology has
indeed a history of exceptional length, and also a progress
which, though slow, has been continuous and steady in the
main ; the nature of its subject-matter explaining at once
how the progress has not been faster, and how it was so
early begun. Yet, early constituted as it was, the science of
mind was by no means the first achievement of human in-
tellect on awaking to reflexion. Two centuries of strenuous
thought passed before mind was so distinctly conceived as
to become, with Plato, the subject of special inquiry. The
-aboriginal dualistic conception of soul as a separable entity
spread somehow through the body was there, lingering on
for future transformation, but at first it was quite submerged
by the thought of finding one universal expression for the
whole variety of human experience, which had now been taken
into view. A " hylozoic monism," without distinction of
mind, or even of life, from other change in things, was the
•earliest express theory of the universe as a whole.. Only
when, still keeping in view the need for a comprehensive
theory, successive thinkers became struck with this or that
aspect of being as more important than others, and in par-
ticular awoke, however partially, to contemplation on the
facts of subjective experience, and were faced by the contra-
dictions of sense and cognition, did the primitive dualism
begin to re-assert itself with new fulness of meaning as the
true account of human nature ; not without help, as already
suggested, from the lights afforded by medical practice. All
this is worked out, at adequate length and with great clear-
ness of insight, by Prof. Siebeck. When he passes to Plato,
through the Sophists and Socrates, in both of whom, to
whatever different purpose, the subjective attitude necessary
for psychological science is seen to be decisively gained, he
finds it necessary to enlarge to an extent only less than
afterwards as regards Aristotle. In Plato the rehabilitated
dualism of natural fancy becomes metaphysically theorised
with an ethical purpose, yet so as to give occasion for a de-
tailed survey of the whole range of mental life such as no one
410 THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY.
(at least in the West) had ever undertaken before. None of
the phases of human activity, theoretic or practical, remain
any longer in shadow ; and there is left for Aristotle only
the task of re-investigation from a more disinterested point
of -view — in the spirit of science rather than with reference
to a moral and religious ideal. How this was carried through
we may here best indicate, not by any attempt to examine
Prof. Siebeck's admirable exposition of the Aristotelian
doctrine or his view of its strength and its shortcomings,
but as we follow his account of the later psychology, and
note with him the long-protracted efforts made by professed
adherents to understand and develop, or by others to modify
and supplement, the scientific scheme with which all had
henceforth to reckon.
Two general movements are distinguished by the historian
within the time while as yet the Greek (or Graeco-Roman)
mind had not become dominated — though towards the end it
was largely affected — by religious ideas of Oriental, chiefly
Hebrew, origin : (1) a complex and highly-diversified move-
ment of "monistic naturalism," which evoked (2) a sharply
marked " spiritualistic reaction '*. The first rubric is intended
to cover the Stoic and the Epicurean as well as the Peripatetic
psychology, with the notable contribution made by Galen
and other physiologists engaged in medical practice. Upon
this movement as a whole (if it may be called one movement),
Prof. Siebeck is constrained at the end to write the word
failure ; though the observations he records as made within
the period, in the series of well-ordered chapters, so brimful
of matter, occupying pp. 128-296, may not seldom incline the
reader to demur to his depreciatory estimate. It is certainly
impossible not to be struck with the advance then made
beyond Aristotle, at a multitude of points, towards the
accepted positions of later psychological science. If, outside
mathematics, there was any progress being made in scientific
knowledge, it was mainly in the psychological field. Yet
Prof. Siebeck is doubtless justified in asserting that Aristotle's
naturalistic successors failed to maintain the inquiry at the
level to which 'he had raised it. When they did effective
work, it was by following the lead he had given ; and in
general they were far from comprehending the profounder
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. 411
(philosophical) ideas that had enabled him to bring mind into
line with other subjects of scientific inquiry or even give it
scientific treatment in advance of the others. In particular,
the conception of man as an organic unity, whereby he was
able to give a "real" explanation (in physiological terms) of
mental processes and functions — short, it is true, of the
highest — while maintaining the independence of their sub-
jective character and reserving their philosophical import,
was with difficulty kept by his Peripatetic followers from
passing, and often did pass, into an assertion of mere material-
ism. Epicureans and Stoics, on the other hand, never either
of them attained to the height of the conception, but each,
in their different ways, secured a real ground of explanation
at the sacrifice, generally, of the more distinctive character-
istics of mental life.
It is to help in threading his way through the complex
tangle of Post-Aristotelian inquiry that Prof. Siebeck finds
it expedient, or necessary, to follow out separately, in a pre-
liminary chapter, the history of the notion Pneuma ; incor-
porating, in somewhat reduced form, a research he had
previously published in the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsycholoyic
u. Sprachwissenschaft, xii. 4. From being employed origin-
ally, in the sense of air or warm vapour, to designate the
inner active principle in man regarded as made up of two
extended entities, soul and body, one within the other, Pneuma
comes in course of time to be understood as soul in a sense
exclusive of all material attribution, and more especially, from
the religious point of view, as the element in human nature
setting man in felt relation with Deity. But while soul,
under whatever name, is becoming conceived antithetically
to body in every respect except in that of real existence,
Pneuma tends also to acquire the other import of inter-
mediary between the two opposite terms. The primitive
crude dualism thus passes into a trinalism of human nature,
not only for Christian teachers and for such metaphysical
thinkers as join to supreme concern for an ethical or religious
purpose an interest in theoretic explanation. Scientific in-
quirers also, who start from no definite metaphysical posi-
tion, are seen to be moved in the like direction of interpreting
subjective mental experience, once brought distinctly within
41'2 THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY.
ken, as proceeding in connexion with bodily changes through
a special agency called Vital or Animal Spirit. To all such,
Pneuma, in its original sense of an attenuated matter like
air or vapour, offers itself as exactly the mean term that is
wanted. Material like the body into which it enters and out
of which it passes, it is by its invisibility and rarity akin to
whatever can be thought of as opposed to gross material
substance and thus to mind or soul subjectively apprehended.
Especially will this consideration impress itself upon physio-
logical inquirers, who, as they learn more and more of the
detail of vital processes among which respiration stands
foremost, have the task of understanding the bodily life in
connexion with the mental life so intimately blended with it.
It is thus that Galen and his medical fore-runners and
successors acquire a peculiar importance in the history of
psychological theory. Recognising, as Aristotle did not, the
special relation in which the nervous system stands to mind,
they elaborated a theory of nerve-action by means of " animal
spirits " which, however erroneous from their failure (though
distinguishing between arteries and veins) to anticipate
Harvey's revolutionary discovery, served to give a truer re-
presentation than Aristotle's of the actual physical basis of
mental processes and has left abiding traces in common
speech. Aristotle himself did not, in his physiology, wholly
dispense with the agency of Pneuma in the sense of animal
heat ; but, besides the physiologists, it was the Stoics who
most persistently took advantage of its ambiguous character,
and, while freely using it as a physical agent wrherever called
for, sought also to express by means of it not only the being
and activity of mind but also the abstract qualities of
things through which they become the subject of thought.
The notion, in short, is one that, as it is employed, gives the
measure, at every stage, of the advance made, on the one
hand, in power of abstract conception, and, on the other, in
determination to keep the realm of properly subjective ex-
perience, as it gradually opens up and deepens, in relation
with the common ground of physical experience upon which
men meet and from which all their inquiry starts. But the
final transformation, as Prof. Siebeck shows, which it under-
went before it became fitted to serve the purposes of the
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. 413
spiritualistic reaction against naturalism that closed the
movement of Pagan thought in antiquity, as also the wants
of upcoming Christianity, was operated through Hebrew in-
fluence. While the Hebrew mind had also started with a
physical conception of the active principle of human nature,
corresponding to the original sense of Pneuma, it had always
viewed this principle as divine in its origin and as a bond
between creature and Creator. It is interesting then to note
that in the Alexandrian Jew Philo the two currents of Greek
thought and Hebrew feeling first come manifestly together,
and, as it happens, Philo uses the word Pneuma at different
places in such a variety of senses, early and late, that the
whole development of the notion can be traced within his
writings.
The other notion, of Consciousness, treated apart by the
author does not accomplish its development till the next
period, when the spiritualistic reaction of the Neoplatonist
school had set in. In the section (pp. 297-357) given to this
movement of reversion from Aristotle to Plato, its causes
and general character are first set out before the psycho-
logical advance, for which the^ school has not received
sufficient credit, is chronicled. The advance, due chiefly
to Plotinus, does not consist only in the explicit recognition
of what is involved in the notion of Consciousness, but this
may be singled out (as by Prof. Siebeck in his special chapter)
for particular notice because of its critical importance. That
the notion should first have been apprehended in its full
import by thinkers who were revolting, under ethical and
religious motives, from a naturalism that had passed into
materialism, and who were ready to sacrifice everything for
the restored sense of inwardness, is not surprising. The
earlier revulsion of Socrates from a less developed form
of naturalism, though similarly motived, led to no such
thorough-going assertion of conscious antithesis of mind to
nature as was now wrung from the Neoplatonist puritans.
Accordingly Plato and Aristotle, in spite of their developed
psychology, have no general word to mark the attitude of
the introspective observer, nor do they clearly recognise that
synthetic activity which is the note of conscious mind alike
for psychologist and philosopher. The fundamental de-
414 THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY.
ficiency was not likely to be made good in the following
period when no advance, but rather the reverse, was made
in general philosophical conception. Nevertheless when
the time came for protest against the Post-Aristotelian
naturalism, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists had the benefit
of the increase of insight that had meanwhile been gained
into the details of psychical experience. In Galen and
several of the Stoics as well as Peripatetics, may be noted
a distinct approach towards the various expressions in which
Piotinus was able at last to characterise effectively the atti-
tude of subjective reflexion upon the whole round of ex-
perience. The significance of the step lies in the fact that
without such a conception of Consciousness as was then
first attained (though not therefore immediately or indeed
for long afterwards utilised), it is impossible to bring into
view the phenomenal opposition of mind and things with which
the scientific psychologist has to work.
The final section, devoted to the Christian rendering of
ancient psychology, though it ranges over many centuries,
from the second to the thirteenth, occupies not much more
than 100 pp., for the good reason because there was no
scientific advance through all that time to compare with
what had been made within two or three centuries before.
At first, Christian thought turned mainly upon the question
of the nature of the soul, and, under the exigencies of appeal
to the popular imagination in regard to a future life, there
was a distinct recrudescence of the old materialistic dualism ;
until Augustin restored the cause of philosophic spiritualism
while asserting the duality of men's nature, and fixed the
main lines of orthodox animism from that time forth. But
Augustin was also, in the more special sense, a psychologist
of mark — the one original inquirer in the Patristic period, and
his observations (on belief in relation to knowledge, on will
and other mental processes), though always having a con-
fessional motive, are such as to deserve all the attention that
Prof. Siebeck accords them (pp. 381-97). In the Scholastic
period, after an account of some more or less independent
tentatives to develop psychological schemes in accordance
with Christian needs — which, in as far as they were not
independent, took colour from Plato — the historian has to
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY. 415
note (in customary fashion) the gradual soaking-in of Aris-
totelian influence from the twelfth to the thirteenth century.
When the saturation of the mediaeval mind had become
complete, he takes perhaps the most effective way of appre-
ciating the result — in a detailed exposition of the psycho-
logical system of Thomas (pp. 448-72).
How far all the various lines of Scholastic activity are
brought sufficiently into view cannot be judged till in his
next volume Prof. Siebeck traces those other currents with-
in the Middle Age which are the true beginning, so far back,
of the Modern movement in psychology. At present some
thinkers are passed over, as Anselm and Abaelard, who,
though they may afterwards be noticed in connexion with
the Nominalistic theory which they differently opposed,
might have had their places assigned in the general de-
velopment as thus far indicated. But, however this may
be, nothing but thanks is due for the instructive presenta-
tion of the Aristotelian psychology in its Christian guise.
The large comprehensiveness of the original doctrine, which
brought mind into relation with life in general, was not lost
upon such an intellect as that of Thomas ; giving his psy-
chological thought that disposition that enables the revived
Scholasticism of these days — revived or at least re-awakened to
militancy — still to present some kind of front to the most re-
cent advances of science. Nor had the Christian discipline
failed to direct attention to aspects of mental life which
Aristotle had overlooked ; so that now they received, upon
Aristotelian lines, a systematic consideration as never before.
The result is a body of psychological doctrine filled out and
articulated to a hitherto unexampled degree. Yet it wants
the vital spark that quickened the original Aristotelian
system. Only at the higher stages of mental development
had Aristotle been unable to carry through his scientific
conception and been fain to have recourse to the external
agency of vov<? ^apia-ros ; but just this foreign element was laid
hold of by Thomas and made the means of transforming the
whole doctrine in a dualistic sense. It was no longer a
dualism of the old crude sort. The abstract thinking of
Plato and of Augustin had done its work, and it was im-
possible any more to represent conscious mind as extended
410 THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY.
in an extended body. But equally impossible was it to-
understand how with body taken as absolutely extended
conscious mind can be in such relations as it is — affected
through body in sense, acting through it in volition, appre-
hending or, as it were, appropriating it in cognition. There
was need, in short, for a radical change of base, if Aristotle's
monistic thought was to be carried through or not aban-
doned, altogether. In the light of the general conception
of consciousness to which Aristotle had not attained, it had
to become understood that the external world of matter,,
inclusive of the specially-organised body, in relation with
which the psychical life proceeds, is not there otherwise
than phenomenally ; so that nothing hinders the assump-
tion throughout of those determinable conditions of mental
process and function whereon the possibility of psychology
as science depends. This insight has been gradually
acquired during later centuries, but that it was already
within the Middle Age beginning to be rendered attainable
is, we have seen, recognised by Prof. Siebeck in leaving
over to the next part to come of his work more than one
strain of inquiry that accompanied or closely followed upon
the scholastic construction of Aristotle's doctrines to which
the Catholic Church bound itself. His readers cannot but
look with eagerness for the continuation of the History, and
wish him strength for the completion of his arduous task.
SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY.1
MR. A. J. BALFOUR'S public-spirited act in endowing (for
three years) a philosophical lectureship in the University of
Edinburgh has here borne excellent first fruits. In the
university of Stewart and Hamilton, no subject could have
been better chosen for the initial course of lectures than a
comparison of the Scottish, and more especially of their
master Reid's, answer to Hume with that German one which
in later days has forced the other almost out of hearing.
Prof. Seth has done a good work in bringing fairly into view,
without exaggerating, Reid's merits, and he has also been
able, within his limits, to give marked effect to the founder's
desire that " the lectures should be a contribution to philo-
sophy and not merely to the history of systems ". As an
express effort to bring directly face to face the opposed
philosophical schools of the present day, the lectures are
specially welcome. They are, as usual with the author, very
well written, and show him not less anxious than ever to
understand and allow for the point of view of those from
whom he differs.
As Reid set out — even more expressly than Kant — to answer
Hume, and saw in Hume the natural term of that movement
of modern philosophy which had been started by Descartes
and had received a new direction from Locke, the first third
of the course of six lectures is occupied with a review of the
" Philosophical Presuppositions " which Hume took from his
predecessors and of the " Philosophical Scepticism " into
which — not partially, like Berkeley before him, but completely
—he ran them out. In the next two lectures, Reid's own
1 A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume. By
ANDREW SETH, M.A., Professor of Logic in the University College of
South Wales and Monmouthshire. (" Balfour Philosophical Lectures,"
University of Edinburgh.) Edinburgh and London : W. Blackwood &
Sons, 1885. Pp. xii., 218. (Mind, xi. '267.)
27
418 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY.
doctrine — especially of Sensation and Perception, upon which
he spent his strength — is considered, and his deficiency of
philosophical system gives the occasion of passage to the
Kantian " Answer " which at least was free from shortcoming
in that respect. Shortcomings enough appear, however,
arising from Kant's readiness to make admissions to Hume
which the wiser Reid had withheld ; and the last third of
the course is occupied first with an exposure of the particular
superstition of " Relativity of Knowledge " which Kant
imposed upon his adherents, including Hamilton within the
Scottish school itself, and then with a consideration of the
help towards philosophical system that may be had by the
truer heirs of Reid's saving common-sense from Kant's pro-
founder successor, Hegel, whose " analysis of the conceptions
of reason as reason " is pronounced " an indefinite advance
on anything that had gone before it in modern philosophy ".
The account of Descartes and Locke, in the first lecture, is
remarkably good. It would be impossible to bring out more
clearly and succinctly the inability of the "two-substance" doc-
trine of the world to afford any explanation of perception or
knowledge. This doctrine, with its mediating factor of" ideas,"
Locke took in all essentials from Descartes; and, if he had not
done service otherwise to the philosophical theory of knowledge
by giving the chief impulse to scientific psychological inquiry in
modern times, his halting and wavering application of it must
have kept him from ever winning any place of importance in
the history of philosophical thought. Berkeley is lightlypassed
overinthe transition (made in the second lecture) to Hume, — on
the just ground that Hume, while drawing directly from Locke
the principles that he carried out to the fateful results, received
at most from the younger thinker mere aid and suggestion ;
but something might have been said of the positive advance
upon Locke that Berkeley did not fail to make in point of
psychological theory, recognised as this was not more by
Hume than by Reid himself. And, apart from any concern
of Reid, the like omission is to be observed in the handling
of Hume. While Prof. Seth brings out in a most effective
way the negative, or at least purely sceptical, character of
Hume's ultimate results, and argues with reason against a
late attempt to represent him simply as a constructive
SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY. 419
philosopher, acknowledgment might still have been made
of the serious purpose with which, as the Introduction to
the Treatise of Human Nature shows, he set himself to the
task of bringing the "science of man," after Locke, into
some kind of line with the physical science of Newton and
others. Nor even as a general philosopher, in respect of
that part of the philosophic function which his champion
Prof. Huxley had not least in view, viz., the providing of a
theory or explanation of the special sciences, can it be said
that Hume is devoid of all constructive aim. Opinions may
differ as to the sufficiency of his theory of physical, still
more of mathematical, science ; but if we are to take him,
as Prof. Seth desires (p. 70), "at his own valuation," — not
only again in the Introduction but throughout many
chapters in the body of the Treatise, — we may hardly deny
that, in the uncertain mixture of his intellectual tempera-
ment, there was after all a considerable dash of the genuine
positive spirit.
Reid's great merit, on the question of perception, is declared
to be his clear insight (in general) into the impossibility of
giving any explanation of that function from an assumption
of unrelated sensations, to be afterwards brought, by one
means or another, into relation. Prof. Seth thinks that the
most advanced psychologists of the present day have been
driven, practically, to the same position, which he would
himself express in the form that, though indeed " sensation
is the condition of perception," "sensation as sensation does
not enter into perception at all " (p. 93). Here we need not
follow him into what he finds well — or again not quite well
— said by Reid, but may remark that, in seeking to apply the
modern psychological doctrine of " local signs " against a vain
distinction made by Reid between the cases of visible and
tangible extension, he gives it first, on pp. 90-1, some rather
questionable expression, and then is led on to use language
about both visual and tactile sensations — that they " must
contain some specific indication or hints as to the whereabouts
of the object if our location of the latter is not to be purely
arbitrary " — which does not seem to consist very well with
the denial (just quoted from next page) to " sensation as sen-
sation " of any import for perception. That denial is, surely,
420 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY.
much too absolutely made. It is plain that in the philoso-
phical analysis of objective perception (or percepts) any ele-
ments of sensation that are disclosed must appear as ordered
or related in manifold fashion, as also that, even for the
individual, any the simplest actual sensation must already
figure as part of a general system of experience ; but it seems
not less plain that from another point of view — which is the
properly psychological one — sensations may and (for purposes
of science) must be regarded as unrelated. The organs of
the different senses, though all physically connected through
the one nervous system, have a relative independence, and
may in different degrees be called separately, or when not
separately then at least distinguishably, into play. While
passive sensations like light and sound can be had to all
intents and purposes wholly apart, it is possible also to get
at the elements of what appears, at first, as a unitary sense-
experience of the active sort (touch, vision, &c.) — because the
co-efficients (of passive sensation and so-called muscular
sense) may be made to vary relatively to one another. Now,
unless it be maintained consistently that the psychological
investigation of the various kinds of sense-experience has no
bearing at all upon a theory of objective perception, there
can be no ground for complaint that they are viewed, in the
first instance, as far as possible, in isolation. From this
ground, we have seen, even Prof. Seth cuts himself off ; still
more Eeid, who never desired to make any distinction between
philosophy and psychology (such as is now from any point of
view seen to be necessary), while he was most earnest in his
wish to proceed upon a psychological basis. Eeid might
therefore very well have gone much farther than he did in
the way of such (psychological) assertion as Prof. Seth shakes
his head over at p. 88. He was safe enough against thinking
(with Hume) that any manipulation of psychological factors,
as such, could of itself, straightway, account for a knowledge
of object.
The want of system in Keid's statement and description
of the principles of knowledge is brought clearly into view ;
at the same time, nothing is passed over that may help to
recover for him the philosophic character which it has been
the fashion to deny him since the time of Kant, or since
SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY. 4'21
Kant's depreciatory opinion of him became known. Speci-
ally interesting, in this connexion, is the reference to the
various passages in the Intellectual Powers, where Reid seeks
in the forms of language a clue — or more than such a mere
" clue " as Kant, in corresponding case, sought from the
school-logic — to the principles, as he called them, of " com-
mon-sense". When the function of language in producing
and maintaining community of knowledge among men is
once considered, its philosophical import is seen to be of
the most profound and far-reaching character ; and Keid,
with his " common-sense," is to be blamed only for allowing
the more important use of the word "common" to be over-
shadowed by its other implication of 'ordinary' (as having
relation to everyday experience and practice). In making
what reference he did to language, he shadowed forth a
surer method of philosophical analysis than Kant, with all
his more laboured art, was able to devise.
Kant— not for the first time — gets somewhat hard measure
from Prof. Seth. However ready to acknowledge his large
manner in comparison with Eeid's, the lecturer is no sooner
embarked upon an examination of the Critical Philosophy
than he finds (like Dr. Hutchison Stirling) so much to
except to in its fundamental positions as to side rather, in
the end, by preference with the modest Philosophy of
Common-sense. Though refusing to accept the home-
grown product under its name of Natural Dualism (which,
of course, brings back the "two-substance theory" in an
aggravated form), he has, apparently, little or no objection
to it under its other guise of Natural Realism. On the
other hand, Kant's categories are, after some consideration,
pronounced " useless because they simply do over again
what is already sufficiently done in the objects themselves "
(p. 140) ; as, again, it is claimed for Experience that, so far
from being identifiable with mere sensation or contingency,
it "yields to the knower objects and relations of objects
which are, to begin with, just what the categories are sup-
posed afterwards to make them " (p. 142). Later on, in the
fifth lecture, the Scottish philosophy is expressly congratu-
lated upon its escape from the dangers of Kant's subjectivism
" by taking up the broad position that while the principles
422 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY.
in question [pure percepts of space and time and categories]
are referable to the constitution of our nature, our nature is,
in respect of them, in complete harmony with the nature of
things" (p. 157). And even in comparison with the method
and achievement of Hegel, it is suggested, in the last lecture
of all, that the Scottish procedure may yet lead to a more
satisfactory determination of the ultimate questions of human
concern. This suggestion is to receive further development
in the coming second course of lectures, which may also
give the best occasion for considering what is here said on
the help to be meanwhile sought from Hegel towards that
end ; but as between Kant, on the one hand, and Reid, with
the truer upholders (than Hamilton) of the Scottish tradi-
tion— " writers like Prof. Calderwood, Prof. Flint and Dr.
M'Cosh of Princeton" (p. 183) — on the other, it may be
asked whether the making of such round assertions about
reality, object and the like, as data of direct experience, does
not come perilously near to abandoning the philosophic task
altogether. Prof. Seth, like Reid before him, makes no
difficulty about surrendering the secondary qualities of matter
to the relativist, let straightforward experience say of them
what it likes, but would draw the line, for perception, at
Aristotle's 'common sensibles,' and speaks of these as an
absolute directly apprehensible by " reason in sense " (p. 154).
Why, though 'common,' should they have an absolute
objective character ascribed to them as against Kant's
subjectivist interpretation, which at least explains how
they can be — as they have to be — combined in perception
with the ' special sensibles,' allowed to be subjective ? Or —
giving the question an expressly, instead of (with Kant) an
implicitly, psychological form — why should they not be re-
ferred to an origin which, while distinctly marking them off
from the varying ' special sensibles ' with which they are
interfused, explains what variability there yet is to be found
in our apprehension of themselves ? The psychologists and
Kant, from their different positions, have then, indeed, a
serious enough task before them to explain what we all
mean by object ; but the work of philosophy is serious — more
serious than Reid, at least, ever quite imagined, once he was
frightened back by Hume from that ' doctrine of Ideas *
SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY. 4'28
which (he tells us himself) he once believed so firmly as to
embrace the whole of Berkeley's system along with it.
Apart from some questionable arguing upon the line here
suggested, there is a great deal of sound and seasonable
doctrine in the lecture on " The Belativity of Knowledge".
It bears with telling effect against the relativism of Kant
and Hamilton, and only does not seem to touch the
Phenomenalists proper who are here too indiscriminately
ranged with the Relativists over against the more " fortun-
ate" Natural Realists of unadulterated Scottish breed.
Indeed, Prof. Seth himself may be thought to reason with
no small force in support of a pure phenomenalism from
p. 167 onwards.1 However that be, enough should have been
said to draw attention to these Balfour Lectures. The
second series will be neglected by no reader of the
first.
1 Is Prof. Seth quite just to Locke at p. 169, when, after quoting a sen-
tence from the Essay, he in the next sentence changes Locke's " ideas of
particular things" into "proper names" ?
PSYCHOLOGY.1
THIS book is one of the welcome signs from America of a
strong forward movement in psychology now in progress
there. The large number of psychological and psychophysical
contributions to Mind that have come from over the Atlantic
in recent years; the announcement that an American Journal
of Psychology is henceforth to be added to the list of scien-
tific periodicals in which the abounding energy of the young
Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore seeks a vent ; the
appearance of a work of the size and comprehensiveness of
Prof. G. T. Ladd's Physiological Psychology, mentioned
elsewhere in the present number and claiming the detailed
appreciation that will follow, — are other evidences, to which
more might be added, of the same fact. It is significant,
too, that the very object of Prof. Dewey's book is to help in
getting "scientific psychology" set before the students of
American colleges, instead of that "compound of logic, ethics
and metaphysics, mingled with extracts from the history of
philosophy " — as he calls it — which it has been usual in the
past to serve up for them, in connexion with some tags of
psychological theory from Reid and Hamilton. Some years
ago in Mind (iv. 89-105) a very effective description was
given of the kind of elementary philosophical instruction so
widely diffused through the United States by the host of
colleges, mostly denominational. If the present manual of
psychology finds its way into general use among American
students, it will not leave things as they were.
A manual of psychology, it is still expressly written as
an introduction to the study of philosophy in general. Not
only is Prof. Dewey of opinion that it is impossible to ex-
clude from the science a reference to the philosophical
1 By JOHN DEWEY, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Michigan
University. New York : Harper & Brothers. Pp. 427. (Mind, xii. 439.)
PSYCHOLOGY.
principles it involves, but he has, as readers of this Review
have been made well aware, very decided views on the quite
special relation that subsists between psychology and philo-
sophy. He finds it possible to reconcile an idealism of the
thoroughgoing modern type, first developed in Germany,
with an adoption of the spirit and aims of the English
psychological school from Locke onwards. It has been
interesting to hear such ungrudging allowance of philo-
sophical import to the work of the English inquirers from
one who speaks the language of a class of thinkers with
whom it has been a common fashion to regard it with a
certain disdain. Somewhat more certainly, however, than
Mr. Sh. Hodgson, from his independent standing-ground,
could (in Mind, No. 44) impeach the validity of the attempt
to bring about an alliance between German transcendentalism
and empirical psychology, may it be doubted whether those
who make a first beginning of study under Prof. Dewey's
guidance will be able to grasp the peculiar philosophical
speech which he is apt to employ in the midst of his psycho-
logical exposition. To be told, for example, at p. 6, that
'" Psychology is the science of the reproduction of some
universal content or existence, whether of knowledge or
action, in the form of individual, unsharable consciousness,"
may prove a hard hearing, even when the student is com-
forted, at p. 157, with the assurance that he will " see more
clearly what is meant " thereby after taking in such a
statement as the following: "The knowledge of the finite
individual is the process by which the individual reproduces
the universal mind, and hence makes real for himself the
universe, which is eternally real for the complete, absolutely
universal intelligence, since involved in its self- objectifying
activity of knowledge ". The author also has a way at times
of resorting to a kind of kaleidoscopic play with antitheses,
which tend to pass over into one another in a manner more
•dazzling than edifying. There is a notable instance at p.
153, where Apperception and Retention are given as the
" tw.o sides of the process of knowledge" — the one account-
ing for the world as it " comes to exist for us," the other
for the self as it •" comes to exist as real ". The antithetic
statements that follow in rapid series through half a page
426 PSYCHOLOGY.
get mixed up in a way that leaves one with no very clear
notion of what it is that Prof. Dewey thinks is done for the
world by self or for self by the world, how in his view it all
comes about, and what that world and self are that he so
sets in face of one another. The philosophy involved does
not seem to do much for the beginner in this case or in
others like it.
It would, however, be giving a very false impression of the
character of this text-book to dwell longer on the features yet
mentioned. As a purely psychological treatise — implying
philosophical principles and portending philosophical issues,
but not necessarily to be used for enforcing particular philo-
sophical conclusions — it has great and obvious merits. While
Knowledge has the inevitable precedence and prominence
(pp. 27-245), a distinct stand has evidently been made for
something like a fairly balanced consideration of the two
other phases of mind. Feeling, especially, within the hundred
pages given to the topic, has received an adequate handling.
Feeling and Will have, besides, their part in two chapters of
general introduction, as again, to some extent, in the account
of Sensation (pp. 27-80) with which " Knowledge " begins.
Nothing, indeed, could be better than the whole general
view that is given of the relation of the three phases to one
another, except when the disposition to merge and dissolve,
in dialectic strain, begins to assert itself for the behoof of
Will as "the complete activity," "self," " man," or what
not, wherein the opposition of Knowledge and Feeling be-
comes reconciled. The misfortune of such reconciliation is
that the " Will" so construed does nothing to remove the need
of still treating Will as a distinguishable mental phase among
the others : and the double sense is confusing.
The account taken of Sensation gives perhaps the simplest
measure of the book's quality. The main results of recent
inquiry about the Senses are well and clearly expounded,
and they are set out in a connexion which makes them
thoroughly serviceable for one psychological purpose at
least. Prof. Dewey has a very distinct notion of the differ-
ence between the actual facts or events of mental life and
the scientific abstractions by means of which it is sought to
comprehend them. Accordingly he distinguishes with ex-
PSYCHOLOGY. 427
cellent effect, under the head Knowledge, the three topics of
"Elements," "Processes" and "Stages". The "Stages"
—Perception, Memory, Imagination, Thinking, Intuition-
are taken last, as representing, so far as is scientifically
possible, what actually goes on in the way of cognition ; the
order here again being determined by the view that there is
a certain abstractness in all the others till in " Intuition "
the fulness of knowledge — "knowledge of an individual"
is reached. Between "Processes" and "Elements" the
psychological problem of Knowledge is aptly conceived as
that of the elaboration of sensations " on the one hand into
the objects known, and on the other into the subject knowing"
(p. 81), or (p. 84) their transformation into a "world of
objects, relations and ideals " and into " the self which knows
and idealises". Sensations are, thus, clearly of account for
Knowledge as elements, to be worked up by the processes
which Prof. Dewey finds to be — respectively for world and
self — Apperception (with Association, Dissociation, Attention,
as its "kinds") and Retention. But in the earlier intro-
ductory section (p. 25) it had been laid down that also the
general problem of Psychology was none other than to
understand how a raw "material" became worked up by
certain "processes" into "results" — described as "the
concrete forms of consciousness, the actual ideas, emotions
and volitions". Now the raw material is in all cases alike
of a sensuous character; at least, it is with none other than
sensuous states that the exposition of Feeling and Will, as
well as of Knowledge, is made to begin. But, whereas the
general scheme of treatment, from elements through pro-
cesses to results, is, as we have seen, effectively carried
through in the case of Knowledge, there is no attempt to
maintain it for the other phases of Mind ; the whole exposi-
tion in their case resolving itself into a description (for
Feeling, as already said, a very good one) of what, in Prof.
Dewey's language, may be called either " stages " or
"results". There is, of course, a good reason for this,
though it does not appear to be anywhere explicitly stated.
It is that "processes" certainly, and "elements" in the
main, have once for all been sufficiently disposed of under
the first head of Knowledge. This, however, amounts to
428 PSYCHOLOGY.
saying that the account of elements and processes is of
general psychological import, and is best presented in one
division apart of General Psychology, as in the scheme of
treatment which Prof. Clark Murray in his Handbook (see
Mind, x. 611, xi. 25) has the credit of first giving currency to
in English. Prof. Dewey could, with mere trifling changes
of detail, have so set apart his chapter on Sensation, with
that on the general principles of mental synthesis which he
calls " Processes of Knowledge " ; and the gain in expository
clearness would, I think, have been undeniable.
There are many points of doctrine set forth in the book
which, if space permitted, there would be pleasure as well as
profit in examining at close quarters. Whether one agrees
or not with the author, it is impossible not to recognise his
freshness and independence of view and telling vigour of
statement. In particular, his analysis of the " Processes of
Knowledge," involving his account of Association, Attention
and other topics now so much to the front, may be com-
mended to the notice of psychological workers. One aspect
of Knowledge, as it happens, is treated by him in the pre-
sent number (47) of Mind at greater length than was possible
in the text-book, arid a read}' opportunity is thus afforded of
gauging his mariner of thinking on the subject. While in
close touch with all the later German and English work in
psychology, he is here no simple repeater of other men's
doctrine. With even more independence of gait, there is
manifest the like intimacy with the best recent inquiry in
the very interesting chapters on the upward " Stages " of
knowledge. Nor at another point, it may also be remarked,
does his exposition come all too short of what in present
circumstances ma}7 fairly be expected — I mean the reference
to physiological conditions. At first, indeed, it seems as if
he were ready to go very far in appeal to these. He does
not hesitate to lay it down (p. 8) that the Introspective
Method fails even to classify the facts of consciousness, much
more to explain them : explanation must be sought first of
all from the Experimental Method (in physiological psycho-
logy), and next, more completely, from the Comparative
Method in its various applications. Accordingly, he refers
freely enough to neurological facts at the stage of sensation,
PSYCHOLOGY. 429
and even includes some short account of psychophysical
procedure. It is very well ; but, if students are to profit by
such reference, it would seem necessary, in a text-book, to
give, once for all, however shortly, a clear and distinct view
of the relation of nervous to mental process and a summary
of the really important and relevant physiological data.
Prof. Bain's example in this matter was worthy of closer
imitation than it has received in any of the later manuals
for students. It is easy of course, and in a way creditable,
to protest against an infusion of physiological smatterings ;
it is also conceivable that a complete psychological theory,
including even a doctrine of sensation, might be worked out
without physiological references. But, in point of fact, no-
body thinks of working out any such theory ; and, as every-
body does import just as much physiological statement as is
found necessary or possible or, it may be, convenient, the
plain course is to do it with sufficient warning and explanation
from the beginning. Prof. Dewey does not do enough in this
way for the help of students. Learners, at least if left to them-
selves with his book, would, I imagine, find it hard enough to
connect with his introductory view of Mind in general the
Doctrine of Sense to which they find themselves straightway
conveyed ; and I say this without ignoring the section soon
inserted on " Relation of the Physical Factor to the Psychi-
cal". (In this, by the way, should not " Psychological Ob-
jection," at p. 41, be called Metaphysical rather?)
On the general question of psychological explanation, I
close with the remark, that if it is to come only, as Prof.
Dewey urges, by resort to the Physiological — or more pro-
perly (in the wider sense of the word) Psychophysical — and
Comparative Methods, there would need to be a good deal
more both of psychophysical and of comparative statement
forthcoming than he has anywhere provided in his book.
Nobody could put more impressively than he does the help-
lessness of both methods apart from the data yielded by
Introspection ; and he has himself given throughout the
work the best proof that the Introspective Method is by
no means so helpless to explain as, at the one place before
noted, he too incautiously avers. It should be added that
every chapter is followed by a most useful conspectus of the
related psychological literature.
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.1
IT is impossible not to admire the author's earnestness of
purpose in this book, and not to envy him (a little) his sense
of achievement. The purpose is high. It is nothing less
than to "place all philosophy on a new basis " (p. 514), by
drawing out a science of Thought from that science of
Language which his own labours have done so much to
advance. Having helped more than most men in tracking
out the past history of the words in use among Aryan
peoples, he is convinced that, "if we fully understood the
whole growth of every word, philosophy would have and
could have no longer any secrets " — nay, "would cease to
exist" (p. 515). The consummation is not going to be
reached just at once, but at least the right path is now1
opened which philosophers, even the greatest, have missed
before. Let the lines he here traces be followed out, and
" several more generations of scholars and philosophers "
should at last see an end of tjie business.
This is a specimen of the fine cheery confidence which
Prof Muller is able to maintain throughout the work ; but
yet he has also another mood. Dixi et salvavi meam aniinam
is the exclamation wrung from him at thought of the de-
generate age upon which he has fallen with his philosophical
plea. Indeed, at starting, he declares it is only for himself
and " a few friends," fellow-travellers with him for many
years on the same road, that he writes at all. So, now and
again, it is borne in upon him what an arduous and toilsome
course that is along which he has to drag the " patient
reader " — if (p. 548) perchance he has a reader ! It is an
odd imagination. The age is, of course, not in the least
degenerate ; and how could he fail to have readers as he
1 By F. MAX MULLER. London : Longmans, Green, & Co., 1887.
Pp. xxiv., 664. (Mind, xiii. 94.)
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 431
wanders with that perfect gaiety of heart from topic to topic,
putting his whole self into everything he says — and this a
self so kindly that he can never meet a foe who is not
straightway made to assume the guise of a friend and ally ?
He has written the most genial and readable of books ; but,
certainly, if for " reader" he had said reviewer, no pity he
had to spare could be too much. The discursiveness of the
work is something extraordinary, and there is toil indeed for
one who will try to reckon up its sum. Nevertheless, let
the trial be made.
The backbone of the book is to be found in some chapters,
beginning with ch. v., from p. 179. In ch. i. the original
start is made naturally enough with an analysis of Thought
into its " Constituent Elements," but this runs down about
p. 30 (not without considerable digression by the way) ; and
the long remainder of the chapter, occupied mainly with a
general discussion of the dependence of Thought upon
Language, still more the next three chapters, are intended
only to clear the way for the more serious business begun in
ch. v. If the preliminary matter — consisting, beyond what has
been already mentioned, of an argument for the impossibility
of supposing the Language of Thought in man to be related to
or evolved from the inarticulate cries of the lower animals —
runs to the length of 178 pp., the reason is not least because
the author has so much personal reminiscence of past deal-
ings with the subjects to give way to. To be sure, there is
included in this introductory part of the work a chapter " On
Kant's Philosophy " (pp. 127-51) ; but neither is this without
relation to past achievement. At last fairly under weigh
from ch. v., Prof. Muller furnishes the complement to his
initial view of the constituent elements of Thought in an
analysis of Language— at least Aryan language — down to
roots, which for the most part prove to be of conceptual im-
port. Ch. vi. (pp. 256-330) is then devoted to a theory of
the origin of Concepts and Boots together, which he has
been led to form with the help — if not under the lead — of
his friend Prof. Noire of Mainz. Next follows a long
chapter in which an examination (after the old Indian
grammarians) of Sanskrit roots is found to confirm the
theory that it was in putting forth repeated actions together
432 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
that inen first spoke with mutual intelligence ; yielding as
final result a scheme of conscious human activities that may
be taken to represent the idees meres of the Aryan race, or
at least of the Indian people. All that then seems to Prof.
Miiller strictly necessary for the fulfilment of his purpose of
placing philosophy upon the new basis is supplied in one
other chapter on the " Formation of Words " (pp. 420-518) ;
in which he shows how roots became transformed by the
" application of categories," works out (in controversy
chiefly with Mill) what he considers a true scheme of Logical
Terms, and enlarges on the function of Metaphor in the
development of speech. A further chapter on "Propositions
and Syllogisms," thrown in as a superfluity, is in fact no
serious makeweight ; and the long " Conclusion " (pp. 548-
618) neither adds anything new to the argument of the book
nor even serves to bring threads together, but simply dis-
courses further on-and-on or about-and-about.
A " Science of Thought " of which these are the stages is
pretty evidently the work of one who is above all a scholar,
and the book may more fairly be regarded and judged as the
author's latest product in Linguistic than as an essay in
Philosophy. That, of course, is not at all his own opinion ;
for not only is the book expressly given out as a philosophical
theory of Reason, but there is promise of its being followed by
a crowning philosophical effort, in which, under the name of
"Science of Mythology," the fact of self-consciousness, now
simply assumed, will have its full mystery probed, and the
relation of the Many to the One — the fundamental question
of all philosophy — will be determined. Nor, certainly, is it
now for the first time that our author's interest in philosophy
becomes known. A few years ago, it will be remembered,
he carried through 110 less serious a labour than the trans-
lation of Kant's chief work (see Mind, vii. 277) ; and, already
some twenty years earlier, the old Lectures on the Science of
Language showed him alive to questions for which the
common linguistic inquirer has little care. Indeed, when
he now contends for a far more intimate relation of Thought
and Language than he finds to be asserted by the majority
of philosophers, he but develops an argument conducted on
similar lines in the second series of Lectures (1864). Never-
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 433
theless, and in spite of the ambitious purpose now pro-
claimed, it may appear, upon a short review of his main
deliverances (taken as far as possible in order), that the
strenuous worker at Science of Language still advances 'but
a little way beyond his old position of philosophical ama-
teur.
The analysis of Thought proposed in ch. i. (pp. 1-76) fails
chiefly in not being carried far enough. Prof. Miiller has
learned from Kant the great lesson that, while sensations
come into consciousness only as percepts, percepts have
definiteness only as they are conceptually understood ; but
the " constituents " of Thought would seem to need a good
deal more particular determination for a "science" of it.
Though Concepts have Names in a special relation with
them, this is no sufficient reason why the fact should no
sooner be noted than all further analysis is forgotten, through-
out the body of the chapter, in the ardour of proving con-
ception impossible without speech, — until, towards the end,
some crude metaphysical explanation of Thought is supple-
mentarily hazarded in terms of " impacts " received by a
" self-conscious Monon" from " other Mona". Ch. ii., with
" Thought and Language " for its declared subject, might
have seemed the natural place for the proof foisted into ch.
i., instead of being itself allowed to turn into something not
at all indicated in the title — an argument against Darwinism.
But, given the author his way, with all its sudden breaks
and turnings, his constituents of thought, as far as made
out, call for at least one remark. However involved with
concepts, surely it is not rightly said, as at p. 2 and more
expressly at p. 20, that names are a fourth element of know-
ledge, related to concepts as concepts to percepts and per-
cepts to sensations. On the one hand, this declaration
appears to give to the concept an (at least relative) inde-
pendence that can hardly be intended by so absolute a
nominalist ; on the other, it appears to give to the name the
same subjective character as belongs to the other elements,
thereby robbing it of all its psychological efficacy. Generally
throughout ch. i. (as else where), it must be added, the author
has a way of playing fast and loose with psychological terms
that does not bode well for the " Science " he would create.
28
434 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
The argument for the inseparability of Thought and Lan-
guage, in which the analysis of thought so soon becomes lost,
is urged partly in the form of a more extended criticism of
the' dicta of philosophers on the subject than the author
had given in the old Lectures, partly in the form of express
reply to objections made against the plea he had there urged.
He nowhere appears to better advantage in the present book
than when so replying. The objections that have ever been
made against the position that, in as far as thought is
general (and thought is essentially general), it has being in
and through some kind of particular expression, overt or
covert, betray a deficiency of psychological insight, and are
very effectively met here. Less satisfactory is the author's
criticism on the philosophers. It is a kind of criticism that
could be made of value only by being rendered at once more
orderly and more extensive. And when in certain thinkers,
even of nominalist faith, there is noted some failure to recog-
nise, or at least declare, the thorough-going implication of
speech with thought, it does not appear to have been suf-
ficiently considered whether such declaration, or even recog-
nition, was not beside their philosophical purpose for the
time being. The fact that Kant in particular says nothing
(except, as has to be confessed, in his Anthropologie) about
speech, and yet accomplishes a philosophical analysis of
thought, the mere fringe of which (as detached in ch. iii.) is
ample covering for the author all through his own under-
taking, might have suggested to him serious doubt whether
the psychological involution of speaking with thinking —
never to be exaggerated in its closeness — has all the philo-
sophical importance here claimed for it.
The other preliminary contention, begun unexpectedly in
ch. ii., is, after the interpolated view of Kant's philosophy in
ch. iii., resumed in ch. iv. under the imposing title of " Lan-
guage the Barrier between Man and Beast ". Prof. Miiller
is of opinion that he cannot safely pass to the study of human
speech as it is expressive of thought unless he first proves
that language in man has nothing in common with the cry
of the brute ; and this, he imagines, can be done only by the
overthrow of Darwin's doctrine of the descent of man from
non-human ancestors. Not that, in his own view, man is not
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 435
also animal, subject to all the conditions (properly under-
stood) of evolution. He has no doubt that there was a
time when man, approximately in present form, did not yet
speak, as there was a still earlier time during which an
indefinite series of previous stages were being passed through
before the recognised human form was reached ; still, in
whatever lower guise and while not yet speaking, the man-
to-be was the only animal destined to speak (and think).
And as no animal off the particular line of human develop-
ment— descended, that is, from any other primitive germ
than the one appointed to grow into speaking man — can
ever become man, so -it is vain, with Darwin and others, to
look for the origin or explanation of speech in any sounds
that brutes can utter. Such, as well as can be gathered
from a discourse that more than rambles and that bristles
in detail with points of questionable statement (here per-
force left aside), is the heart of his contention. The obvious
reflexion upon it, as it stands, is that it appears to remain
beset with all the difficulties it aims at avoiding. If ' man '
not yet speaking, in whatever earlier form, was to all intents
and purposes, or at any rate in effect, an animal like others,
then at least one kind of animal could acquire the speech it
had not, and its speech when acquired cannot be supposed
unrelated to whatever simpler means of expression it had
before it could speak. Doubtless, human speech is the
outcome of no animal sounds (in apes or other creatures) of
which we have present experience, so that, but in the
way of illustration of that which went before speech (proper)
in evolving man, such sounds are not to be drawn into
account ; but, if it must have had an origin which, though
other, was still animal, then to talk of " barrier between
man and beast " is mere rhetoric. Or, if the stress of the
contention is meant to lie in a difference between feeling
which brute cries express and thought which can only be
spoken, this makes thought the true barrier; but the question
then arises whether thought is so far removed from any
kind of animal apprehension that it must have one parti-
cular line of organic evolution appointed for it from the first ;
and, even if this could be proved, the difficulty recurs that
the line is after all a line of animals, thoughtless like any
436 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
other till thought starts out at last within it. We shall see,
too, before long that the author is by no means so sure that
there was nothing that could be called speech in man before
man thought-in-speech ; forgetting, apparently, how fixed
and fast was the "barrier" he had sought to raise for behoof
of human reason. But what has rather to be said of the
long argumentation with Darwin and the Darwinians is that
it appears to be so much waste, thrust in where it is here.
Let it be granted that it is only as man thinks that he
(properly) speaks, and that in man himself, as in " the
beast," vocal expression of mere feeling is not speech proper.
It is an important question, for anthropologist or psycho-
logist, when and how men came so to think-and-speak, —
unless we suppose (as the author emphatically does not)
that they thought-and-spoke always ; but its settlement
need in no way interfere with any conclusions to be drawn
as to the constitution of man's thought from his actual
speech. If such a " Science of Thought " was the author's
real aim, one does not see what occasion there was for him
to take all that trouble about his " rear " (p. 180). Less
haste to be done with the analysis of Thought undertaken
at the beginning would seem to have been more to the
purpose. Be that as it may, however, let us now follow
him, as, with mind relieved from all backward fear, he, in ch.
v., buckles to — or resumes — his appointed task.
" The Constituent Elements of Language," which it here
becomes his first business to discover, are not made out in any
systematic fashion. Some representative specimens of Roots
are obtained by comparison of other Aryan tongues with
Sanskrit, which displays the common radical elements with
greatest evidence : for the rest, he is content to fight over
again, in episodic fashion, the old battle with 'bow-wow'-ists
and ' pooh-pooh'-ists. But, towards the end of the chapter,
he passes into a line of exposition (or remark) that has more
significance, in respect at least of the admissions it involves.
(1) He had formerly supposed that simpler roots are the
more primitive, but is now convinced that " to postulate in
the beginning simple roots with the most general meanings
as previous to complex roots with more special meanings
would be the same mistake in linguistic history as in natural
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 437
history to claim for the genus a priority before the species,
or for the species before the individual" (p. 220). Without
pausing to remark upon the force or aptness of his simile
(more especially as coming from one who argues about
" species" as he does in ch. ii.), there is here a remarkable
approach by an adherent of the school of Bopp to the
position of later inquirers who do not find that the problem
of language is to be solved in accordance with any single
principle of logical development. (2) An equally or still
more remarkable allowance appears in the declaration that,
while two classes of roots are to be signalised, predicative
and demonstrative, the demonstrative " in their primitive
form and intention are addressed to the senses rather than
the intellect " (p. 221) ; and that, though it would simplify
the problem of language to suppose, with Bopp and his
school, that all roots are conceptual, we may, in the demon-
strative elements, be having to do with " remnants of an
earlier stage, if not of language, yet of communication "
(p. 222) — "of the earliest and almost pantomimic phase of
language in which language was hardly as yet what we mean
by language, namely logos, a gathering, but only a pointing "
(p. 241). The allowance could not be more frankly made,
and one misses only some recognition, here or anywhere,
of its bearing upon the contention, so vehemently urged, for
the eternal " barrier " between man and brute. If Human
language had to pass through such an earlier phase —
whether then to be called "language" (as we now under-
stand this) or not — there does not seem to be much left in
the way of barrier. At the same time, one may suggest a
doubt whether Prof. Miiller does not suffer his candour to
carry him too far in the way of allowance. For supposing
"language" were' at first "a pointing" merely, would it
therefore be devoid of all conceptual import, as he seems
here to imply? Surely, it might still be — nay is to be —
maintained that, since even the spoken word is " addressed
to the senses " and could not otherwise do its intellectual
work, the earlier and ruder pantomimic gesture already had
a properly intellectual character. Farewell, else, to all
possibility of establishing the indefeasible relation between
Language and Thought. (3) Our author, finally, is quite
438 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
willing (p. 245) to go all lengths with those who maintain-
as, he reminds them, already Aristotle saw — that the unit of
language is the sentence rather than the word, or, if word,
such word as is nothing less than sentence ; having no
difficulty in supposing that the bare root (prior to the formed
word) should have had from the first all the force and
significance of a sentence, imperative or other. This is very
well ; but then it might have occurred to him, in proceeding
next to study the " Origin of Concepts and Boots " together
in ch. vi., that the initial analysis of Thought never got
beyond the point of eliciting the " Concept " in that most
special sense in which it is related to the fully developed
"Name". The perfunctory character of the work done at
that all-important stage becomes more and more apparent.
In point of fact, " Concept " does now, when it has to be
connected with " Root " instead of " Name," have its import
tacitly widened by Prof. Muller ; though, in beginning ch.
vi. with an historical excursus on the views of English
philosophers from Locke onwards as to the abstract Cgeneral)
idea, he is still concerned with this in its more definite sense,
as related to the "Name". The excursus must not detain
us, but let it be said in passing that it exhibits a looseness of
statement only too characteristic of the author's historical
references throughout. For example, though making
always a great deal of Berkeley — " dear Bishop Berkeley "
as at last (p. 617) he fondly calls him — he is here (pp. 259 ff.)
so little careful to note the exact point of the bishop's
doctrine, which puts no stress upon the "name" in explain-
ing the " abstract idea" (so far as Berkeley will allow of this
at all), that he is found quoting as if from Berkeley himself
well-known phrases of Hume's that quite misrepresent it.1
Coming to the heart of the chapter, we have a sympathetic,
even enthusiastic, exposition of Noire's theory of the origin
of roots, prefaced by or including a lengthy statement of that
writer's general philosophical method and conclusions. So
far as this second digression is again historical, Prof.
JThe true gist of Berkeley's doctrine, which (probably owing to
Hume's misrepresentation in Treatise of Human Nature, i. 1, "§ 5) has too
often been missed, was noted in Mind, iii. 386, on occasion of Dr. A.
Meinong's admirable statement of it in his Hume-Studien, i. (See above,
p. 363.)
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 439
Miiller might well have spared it to his readers, having
before overladen his translation of Kant's Kritik with such
a dead weight of ' Introduction ' in that kind from his friend ;
nor can gratitude be professed for the metaphysical part of
it, so little helpful to the business in hand. It is more to
the point when he goes on to tell how Noire himself held a
view of the origin of speech allied to that of Darwin and the
common evolutionist school, before, in 1877, he committed
himself in his Ursprung der Sprache to the definite position
that men's first articulate utterances emerged on occasion of
their putting forth some conscious activity in common. The
fact that the action (as of grinding, weaving, or what not)
was a repeated one lent to the utterance a conceptual
character, inasmuch as the utterance was a means of giving
unity to a multiplicity ; and the fact of its emerging, under
common conditions of organisation, from a number of
throats together, made it at once significant for purposes
of intercommunication. Our author had himself been so far
on the way to some such view as this that he was prepared
to accept it as soon as formulated by Noire, subject to its
proving comprehensive -enough to cover all the facts. In
particular, he had a difficulty in seeing what relation . there
was between human activities, supposed to be thus so
naturally expressible in sounds, and the visible or other
sensible qualities of things, which men had had no difficulty
in naming. The difficulty vanished on closer examination,
because it appeared that the names of colours, &c., when
sufficiently analysed, had roots themselves expressive of
some human activity (e.g., Sk. ' varna,' colour, being from a
root which means to 'cover'). Yet, while giving in his
adhesion to Noire's theory in general, he is still constrained
to allow (as Noire does not) that a certain number of roots
may have had other origin. Boots that are expressive of
natural sounds may very well, he thinks, have arisen by way
of imitation, i.e., onomatopoetically ; and even where human
activity is involved, as in the process of grinding, he is not
sure that the original root expressing the act may not be an
imitation of the sound resulting from the act rather than (as
Noire contends) the direct accompaniment of the act itself.
These are, again, notable admissions, which might well have
440 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
suggested to the author a less uncompromising tone in his
preliminary contention with the Darwinian evolutionists.
But, to let that pass, there is nothing but praise due to him
for the spirit, and in general also for the matter, of all these
later parts of ch. vi. They show him superior to the weak-
ness of supposing that the origin of language, in all its multi-
tudinous stages and varieties, is to be straightway solved by
any single sweeping theory. At the same time he does very
well to make as much as he can of Noire's luminous idea.
There is evident truth in the position that, as nothing is
more natural than for men to act and to act in common, so
it is on occasion of general bodily work that the special
activity of throat and tongue will most readily be called into
play. The real nerve, however, of Noire's theory as ex-
planatory of the phenomenon of conscious speech may be
held to lie in that part of it which is not peculiar (if any
part of it is quite peculiar) to himself, but which he has in
common with all the more clear-sighted theorists about
language within the present century. What turns any
utterance into speech is not the fact of its arising upon this
occasion or upon that — as the accompaniment of an overt
activity rather than as the outcome of impressions passively
received ; but it is the fact that upon being sped it is taken
up and thrown back upon the utterer by his kind. What
the poet says of a jest, that its —
"prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never on the tongue
Of him that makes it,"
is not less true of everything spoken. Language is an essen-
tially social product, arising for practical purposes of com-
munication between man and man, and only secondarily
having an intellectual use for the individual thinker. Our
author's reservations, in the act of adhering with such gen-
erous warmth to his friend's theory, may fairly be taken as
declaratory to this more general effect.
The long chapter that next follows on " The Roots of
Sanskrit " (pp. 331-419) need not long detain us, notwith-
standing that its linguistic details in all their minuteness are
intended to serve the purposes of the author's main argu-
ment. It is to be shown that the radical analysis of San-
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 441
skrit — assumed always to be that form of (Aryan) speech
which not only retains distinctest traces of the manner of
its original construction but also has on the whole the
best title to seniority among its sister-forms — affords the
exact verification that is wanted of the theoretic view, that
men's first spoken utterances had reference to activities they
consciously put forth in common. In the end, however, the
author is himself not sure to what number of hundreds the
thousand or so of roots that have been identified early or late
by the labours of Sanskrit scholars must be brought down
before the true ultimates, or rather primaries, are obtained ;
nor does he give as more than tentative a list of " The 121
Original Concepts " — " primitive social acts of primitive social
men and states more or less closely related to such acts"
to which the few hundred roots gave more or less varied ex-
pression. It is, no doubt, an interesting historical fact to
know — as far as may be known in this way — what ideas were
chiefly in the heads of our Aryan ancestors. It is instructive
also to be able to follow, so clearly and distinctly as appears
to be possible in the case of Sanskrit roots, the kind of simple
transformations whereby a small number of original elements
can be made to serve the vast multitude of human needs and
occasions of expression. We are not therefore brought even
approximately face to face with the earliest efforts of human
speech ; though these, in general character, may have been
of a kind not unrelated to that which is disclosed in the par-
ticular Aryan tongue that at once lends itself best to study
and has thus far been studied with best effect. Still less do
the " 120 mother-ideas of the Indian intellect," even if we
take their discovery to be as remarkable an achievement of
the " Science of Thought " as the author claims (p. 419),
seem to carry us any length at all towards settling the
philosophical questions that beset the human mind.
Does he then accomplish more for philosophy proper in
what remains? The important ch. viii., on " Formation of
Words," joins on to some interesting pages at the end of ch.
vi., just before the thread of the exposition (as far as thread
can be traced) was broken for behoof of the special linguistic
inquiry of ch. vii. It was there shown how easily and natu-
rally a root expressive of some primitive conscious act could
442 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
be made to assume the variety of verbal phases (distinguished
as active, neutral, passive, active transitive), and especially
how, by way of what the author calls " Fundamental Meta-
phor" (a subject which later on he takes up again and fol-
lows out at length, in an interesting manner, from p. 485),
speech originally expressive of the subject's own acts or
states can be rendered applicable to events and changes in
the objective world. He now, in ch. viii., settles down ex-
pressly to the task of following out the transformation of roots
into the words — more particularly nouns substantive and ad-
jective— of actual speech. First we have some loose disserta-
tion on the Categories of Aristotle and other thinkers, with
the result that Aristotle's table is taken as an at least practi-
cally sufficient index to the principles governing the transfor-
mation. I make bold to call the dissertation loose because
while little perception is shown of the issues involved in the
various schemes of Categories propounded by different phil-
osophers, the interpretation even of Aristotle's is curiously
vague and uncertain. Instead of seeing that Aristotle might
naturally, and did in fact, employ the word " category " to
designate those elements of predication — whether subject or
predicate — which he sought for by dissolving the tie of the
proposition, he understands the word as meaning "predica-
tion " (p. 424), or again (p. 432) " kinds of predication," —
obviously confusing ' predicament ' (category) now with
'predicate' and now with ' predicable'. Also, he will have
it (p. 432) that the word manifests Aristotle's insight into the
fact that all words were in the first instance sentences —
Which sentences then dwindled into words. This is a re-
markable gloss upon Aristotle's deliverance, to which he had
elsewhere (p. 245) rightly called attention, that the logician
must start with the proposition as representing the uuit of
thought; but, passing this by, are we then told, as we might
expect, the various forms of " sentence " which the different
kinds of word first assumed, before the process of shrinkage
set in ? By no means. There is put forward instead, from
p. 433, the different conception, that language arises accord-
ing as roots, which are " abstract, never concrete," become
predicated " of this or that " — a process that is straightway,
alternatively, called " applying the category of oixria or
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 443
substance to the roots " (cp. p. 441). The equivalence of the
two expressions is not very apparent, but, however that may
be, we gather from the first of them that the process consists
in predicating the (abstract) root " of this or that," — that is
to say, " root" is predicate in the case. Pass then to p. 443,
and we read : " The first category predicates substance, the
second, third and fourth quality," &c. Here it is "category"
that has become predicate. And what has now become of
the (abstract) root? I must confess that, after every effort,
expended the more freely here because here if anywhere the
author is touching philosophical ground, I can make out no
coherent result from all this Category-business of his. The
illustrations he gives of substantive nouns as involving
abstract conception no less than adjectives, or again of some
primitive root as lending itself to most varied application
with or even without the aid of suffixes, are all very well ;
but exactly how the (Aristotelian) categories determine the
process of word-formation — this is what remains obscure and
perplexed to the end, for all his manifold references to them.
And, supposing they did — as, of course, they in another
way, or other formative notions in place of them, do — govern
the process, does not this involve a distinct admission on the
author's part that, underlying all such questions of word-for-
mation as he here seeks to grapple with, there is the properly
philosophical question : What the fundamental principles of
human thinking are ? The study of Language may help to
shed a supplementary light upon these; but when words
themselves cannot be understood except in the light of the
fundamental principles (expressed as " Categories " or what
not), it is surely by another method, the method of subjective
analysis as practised by Kant and Aristotle and philosophers
generally, that the principles are to be determined.
The haphazard sequence of topics beyond the point to
which we have thus far steadily pursued Prof. Muller on his
track, makes it inexpedient, or hardly possible, to continue
following him in the same fashion ; and the more because
his treatment now becomes so largely controversial. I refer
not only to the "Conclusion" (ch. x.), in which he delivers
himself, against Mill or others, on a variety of special
philosophical questions, or to the remarks on (at least)
444 THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
"Propositions" in ch. ix., but also to the discussion on
Logical Terms, carried on chiefly with Mill, which occupies
the remainder of ch. viii., till he expands towards the close
on that subject of Metaphor which he had touched upon
earlier, at the end of ch. vi. The judgments, in the closing
ch. x., on this or that question debated of late among
philosophical thinkers show his keen interest in the topics
of highest intellectual concern, but, though the deliverances
have mixed up with them many a reference to Language, it
rarely or never appears what real connexion the one line
of observation has with the other. Before this general
epilogue, which demonstrates nothing so much as the
author's sweetness of controversial temper, is reached, the
effort made, with a doctrine of Terms and Propositions
(what is said on Syllogisms is of no account), to demonstrate
the ground of philosophical vantage held by the linguistic
student, is more systematic — without being more successful.
I do not believe the logician exists who could profess himself
helped, in his work of understanding the import of thought
and regulating its exercise, by such distinction of Proposi-
tions as is here (in ch. ix.) hazarded with or without
reference — for the reference has not even the merit of be-
ing steadily sustained — to the rudimentary forms of pre-
dication that may be imagined to have done duty for the
awakening intelligence of the first generations of speak-
ing men. And (in ch. viii.) let the reader examine the
scheme, strangely entitled of " Hoots or Concepts," which,
at p. 475, after his detailed criticism of Mill's account of
Names, the author propounds as that better, nay " best,"
classification of words for logical purposes " which is
supplied by the history of language". The scheme is
strangely called one of " Boots or Concepts " when, whether
conceptual or no, it is a question of the Words or Names
into which Boots have passed; but it is more important to
observe that the scheme does not appear to have any logical
utility at all. How does it avail the logician, occupied with
the concept as expressed in the general name which is the
indispensable means of abstract consideration, to be told by
what device of unconscious passage through the collective
noun (which expresses a complex object of sensej the general
THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 445
name as instrument of abstract thought was originally
forged? Collectives as such are to be considered by the
logician only in order to be excluded. In Prof. Miiller's sug-
gested scheme of logical terms, and in all the controversial
skirmishes through which he fights his way to it, there is no
sign of his having ever fairly asked himself the question what
the precise philosophical function of the logician is, or what
bearing the history of the development of words, so far as it
can be made out, could have upon it. To be sure, logicians
in general, and Mill among them, have not been too careful
to confine themselves only to such distinctions of terms, or
pursue their distinctions only to such lengths, as concern
their own business. They thus in many ways lie open to a
criticism that could easily be made trenchant enough. But
as for the emendations which Prof. Miiller tries to make
upon Mill in particular, it cannot be said that they are
successfully or skilfully made. To prove this in detail, by
comparison (as would be necessary) of statements of the two
writers, is more than can be attempted at the end of this
lengthy notice. It may suffice here to point to any two or
three pages among the twenty or thirty from p. 444, in support
of the charge against our author of a want of grasp in these
matters of logical controversy. Or, to narrow the issue,
let trial be made of his character for discernment — meaning,
always, philosophical discernment — upon the three pages,
471-4, given to the topic of " Connotative and Denotative
Terms ".
THE ELEMENTS OF LAW NATURAL AND
POLITIC ; l
AND
BEHEMOTH OR THE LONG PARLIAMENT.2
THE service here rendered by a foreign scholar to the
reputation of a great English thinker deserves warm
acknowledgment. These carefully edited reprints of famous
works, never before edited with any (or at least sufficient)
care, would have seen the light four years ago (see Mind, ix.
618, xii. 481) if the publisher who originally undertook to
bring them forth had not unaccountably left his engagement
ever since then unfulfilled. The sheets that have lain all
that time printed off are now at last made accessible to
readers by the public spirit of Dr. Tbnnies himself, who,
rather than longer delay an act of justice to Hobbes, incurs
the whole charge of issuing the two volumes. It cannot be
improper to express the hope that students whether of
English philosophy or of English literature will help him to
bear the charge.
The first of the two volumes is philosophically the more
important, though the other, with greater general interest,
is not without philosophical significance also. Under the
single title of The Elements of Law Natural and Politic,
the two treatises so well known in separation as Human
Nature and De Corpore Politico are now presented as inter-
locked parts of one continuous work. I have elsewhere, on
more than one occasion, shown that the two little books,
1 By THOMAS HOBBES of Malmesbury. Edited with a Preface and
Critical Notes by FERDINAND T(ENNIES, Ph.D. To which are subjoined
Selected Extracts from Unprinted MSS. of THOMAS HOBBES. London :
Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1889. Pp. xvi., 226.
2 By THOMAS HOBBES of Malmesbury. Edited for the first time from the
Original MS. by FERDINAND TOZNNIES, Ph.D. London : Simpkin, Marshall
& Co., 1889. Pp. xi., 204. (Mind, xiv. 429.)
HOBBES'S ELEMENTS OF LAW, ETC. 447
published separately in 1650 not from Hobbes's own hand
(he being still in his Parisian exile, and at the time busily
engaged on the completion of Leviathan, to appear in the
following year), were written by the spring of 1640, some
time before the Civil War, as one piece. It seems impossible
now to determine exactly how far, if at all, Hobbes was
concerned in the publication as it actually took place. Cer-
tain it is, from various MSS. of the original work still extant,
that the little books as published neither were ever meant by
Hobbes himself to be read apart, nor in point of fact repre-
sented in their separation the two parts into which, as
suggested in the true title, the original work was from the
first disposed ; the first part as written covering, with Human
Nature as published, no less than six chapters (set out as a
first of two parts) of the published De Corpore Politico. The
very valuable MS. copy at Hardwick Hall, containing with
many scattered jottings the whole long dedication written in
Hobbes's hand, first disclosed to me the unity of the work ;
but the fact, not before suspected, ought to have been
discovered, without reference to MSS., by the indications of
original unity left here and there in the dislocated constitu-
ents hitherto printed. Any way, the fact became evident,
and its decisive import for a true understanding of the
development of Hobbes's thought will, it is hoped, never-
more be overlooked by historians of philosophy. But now
for the service which Dr. Tbnnies, as no other, has seen to
be wanting to the fair fame of the philosopher. Not only
did he discover for himself, upon a number of MSS., the
true relation of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico
before this had been made known, but, resenting the mani-
fest defects or errors of the published text, he determined
to supply a correct one by collation (never before attempted)
of all the accessible MSS. copies. These, of which there
are as many as six (the large number being due to the fact
that the work was freely circulated in MS. form from 1640),
differ a good deal amongst themselves ; the two of chief
value having discrepant insertions or erasures in Hobbes's
hand that show anxious and careful revision on his part.
The problem was therefore, out of the varying MSS., to
produce a text that should be not only free of misprints, but
448 HOBBES'S ELEMENTS OF LAW, ETC.
also as complete as possible. Since neither of the best
MSS., to one or other of which the rest approximate, can
be certainly taken as representing Hobbes's definite selection
of phrase for the expression of his thought, it clearly was
right to give, as Dr. Tonnies has given, the fullest possible
text, with footnote indications of the changes which such a
master of phrasing fell, at one time or other, upon making.
But after all, in the case of a work which even in its
hitherto unsatisfactory form has been regarded as a master-
piece of expression, the more important thing was to get
rid, once and finally, of the blots disfiguring all the pre-
vious editions. This has now been done by Dr. Tonnies's
collation of MSS., in the way that if most laborious is also
most effective ; and the fact that a much easier comparison
of the various printed editions might equally have served to
remove all the serious blots enhances rather than lessens
the merit of his appeal straight to the original sources.
One example (on which I have already touched elsewhere)
from Human Nature will suffice to show what a work was
left to be done for Hobbes by any conscientious editor. It
should first be mentioned that nearly all the more important
corrections made by Dr. Tonnies affect that part (more
strictly, those chapters) of the Elements that first got into
print as Human Nature : whatever the cause, it has fared
better all along with the De Corpore Politico. Now, if
Molesworth's edition, which was meant to become the
standard one and which is practically the only edition acces-
sible, is consulted at one of the most important points of
Hobbes's psychological doctrine (English Works, iv. 68), this
is what we read : —
" Voluntary actions and omissions are such as have beginning in the
will ; all others are involuntary, or mixed voluntary ; involuntary such as
he doth by necessity of nature, as when he is pushed or falleth, and
thereby doth good or hurt to another : mixed, such as participate of
both ; as when a man is carried to prison, going is voluntary, to the
prison is involuntary : the example," &c.
Here " mixed voluntary " is nonsense, and has nothing after-
wards corresponding to it, the subsequent explanation being
of "mixed" only; also the words "such as he," &c., given
in explanation of " involuntary," are unaccounted for, nobody
HOBBES'S ELEMENTS OF LAW, ETC. 449
having been mentioned before in the paragraph. Going
back to the folio edition of 1750, which Molesworth had
before him, and from which he probably printed, or rather
(as Mrs. Grote's privately circulated recollections suggest)
set his secretary to print, we get light on the second diffi-
culty, the first lines of the paragraph thus running : —
" Voluntary actions and omissions are such as have beginning in the
will ; all others are involuntary or mixed voluntary, such as a man doth
upon appetite or fear ; involuntary, such as he doth," &c.
The " he " is thus accounted for ; but the monstrosity of
" mixed voluntary " still remains, as it had figured also in the
two directly prior editions of 1684 and 1651. This latter
boldly gives itself out as, in comparison with the first edition
of 1650, " augmented and much corrected by the author's
own hand " ; and here and there, no doubt, corrections are to
be found, which may have been made by reference to some
one of the MSS. copies which Hobbes had handled. That
Tie was not himself, in any other way, responsible for the
1651 edition is, however, certain, since then for the first time
the gross blunder of " mixed voluntary " appeared. What-
ever the other shortcomings of the original edition of 1650,
this particular passage had there been correctly given, by
presence of an all-important colon between "mixed" and
"voluntary," — found again only in the small edition (of 250
copies) issued in 1812 by Philip Mallet, which, though it
elsewhere goes wrong with the otherwise misleading edition
of 1651, sets right this worst error of all. The example has
thus far shown how, by comparison of editions if carried back
to the first, or even (as it probably was with Mallet) by
common-sense, the serious blots in Human Nature might
have been removed without reference to MSS. at all. But,
if now, by the side of Molesworth's peculiarly aggravated
misrendering given above, the whole passage is read as Dr.
Tonnies gives it (p. 62), it will be seen that his recourse to
the original sources has resulted also in a positive gain : —
" VOLUNTARY actions and omissions are such as have beginning in the
will ; all other are INVOLUNTARY or MIXED. Voluntary such as a man
doth upon appetite or fear ; involuntary such as he doth by necessity
of nature, as when he is pushed, or falleth, and thereby doth good or hurt
29
450 HOBBES'S ELEMENTS OF LAW, ETC.
to another ; mixed, such as participate of both ; as when a man is
carried to prison [he is pulled on against his will, and yet goeth upright
voluntarily, for fear of being trailed along the ground ; insomuch that in
going to prison], going is voluntary; to the prison, involuntary. The
example," &c., as before.
The words, here for distinction put between brackets, are
printed for the first time by Dr. Tonnies, and have undeni-
able force in pointing the illustration. Perhaps no other
one passage could be cited where, within the same compass,
there is so much at once added and corrected ; but the ex-
ample is none the less fairly representative of the improve-
ments, negative or positive, made on every page of this new
edition. If, with or without the chapters hitherto known as
De Corpore Politico, the other chapters passing as Human
Nature have taken rank as a philosophical classic, still more
may that distinction be henceforth claimed for The Elements
of Law Natural and Politic, now at last correctly and com-
pletely presented with all the traces of Hobbes's hand upon
it.
As to the previously unprinted pieces here appended by
Dr. Tonnies to the Elements, one of them at least, A Short
Tract on First Principles (pp. 193-210), was well worth
bringing out of its MS. obscurity, because of the curious
stage it marks in Hobbes's passage, about 1630 (after he
had learned some geometry), from the traditional scholasti-
cism to the new mechanical philosophy of the century.
The extracts given (pp. 211-26) from an unpublished Tract-
atus Opticus are of less account. If Dr. Tonnies is right,
as he may be, in dating this treatise as far back as towards
1637, he can hardly have ground for saying that "it is evi-
dently the first draft of what was intended as the second
section of his system of philosophy, viz., the De Homine".
There is no reason to suppose that anything, optical or not,
that we now read in the De Homine can have been drafted
till a considerable time later. The point, however, is too
unimportant, considering the relative unimportance of the
De Homine altogether in Hobbes's system, to justify further
remark upon it here.
The second reprint, Behemoth, can be welcomed in few
words. Dr. Tonnies has found, in the library of St. John's
HOBBES'S ELEMENTS OF LAW, ETC. 451
College, Oxford, what is evidently the original MS. of that
racy production of Hobbes's old age. Composed towards
1668, and prevented from appearing by Charles II., to whom
it was shown, it got surreptitiously into print from an im-
perfect MS. copy just before the philosopher's death in 1679;
nor, though Hobbes's own publisher professed to give it
from the original in 1682, can he have printed from any-
thing but a less imperfect copy. The St. John's College
MS., bearing corrections in the author's hand, has enabled
Dr. Tbnnies to fill in a large number of careless omissions
of the copyists, and, further, some passages or phrases
which, erased apparently from prudential motives, were not
so obliterated that they could not in general be deciphered
and restored. A dedication to Hobbes's friend at court,
Lord Arlington, is, for the first time, made known ; but,
most important gain of all, we now learn the true title of
the work with its special significance. Followed by the
old sub-title, " The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of
England from 1640 to 1660," the name Behemoth seemed
nothing more than a verbal fancy after the name Leviathan.
It is now seen that, as this was taken from the Book of Job
to pictorially mark " The Matter, Form and Power of a
Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil," so Hobbes went
back to the same source for the name of the other monster
to figure " The Long Parliament " that had reared itself
for so many years against the lawful government of his
country. Dr. Tb'nnies has found that, in a hitherto un-
published part of a letter to Aubrey, Hobbes spoke of the
other as a "foolish title" when the unauthorised publica-
tion came upon him as a surprise in 1679.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.1
CLOSER examination confirms a first impression (Mind, No.
56, p. 598) of the special importance of this book. Among
the recent productions of the younger French psychological
school, it has features of its own that arrest attention.
Nothing has of late been more remarkable than the great
increase of psychological activity in France. With the
Revue Philosophique there at hand, in monthly issue, to
stimulate as well as welcome new investigation, a large
number of more or less well-trained workers have thrown
themselves upon particular problems of psychology, and
have obtained results of no small interest and promise.
While in other countries, where positive psychological in-
quiry is being pursued (as not yet in England) by an active
professional class, the endeavour at present is rather to get
more exact results upon the beaten lines of psychophysics,
in France there has been a singular eagerness to break new
ground for psychology on the field of abnormal mental
experience — chiefly that state of hypnotic trance which
lends itself so readily to the conditions of scientific experi-
ment. In saying France, Belgium is not to be forgotten,
with Prof. Delboeuf so much to the front ; nor is it meant
that in other countries (England this time not excepted)
effective part has not been taken in hypnotic research. Still
in France, as there, for whatever reason, hypnotic 'subjects'
appear to abound in exceptional number and variety, so a
larger body of trained and capable investigators has started
up to turn the multitude of new, or at least newly ascer-
tained, facts to psychological account. MM. Beaunis, Binet,
Fere, Bichet, are some of those that have of late been most
1 L' Automatism* Psychologique. Essai de Psychologie experimentale
sur les Formes inferieures de 1'Activite humaine. Par PIERRE JANET,
Ancien eleve de 1'Ecole normale superieure, Professeur agre'ge' de Philo-
sophic au Lycee du Havre, Docteur es Lettres. Paris : F. Alcan, 1889.
Pp. 496. (Mind, xv. 120.)
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 453
active in the work of positive research as well as of inter-
pretation ; and now by his present volume, which sums up and
brings to a head the independent investigation of some years
past, Prof. Pierre Janet of Havre (not to be confounded
with the well-known Prof. Paul Janet of Paris) takes rank
among the foremost of those who are pressing on to issues
of remarkable enough import.
There is the more reason not to delay giving some account
of the volume, as it happens that, in the present number (57)
of Mind, M. Binet deals at first hand with the same question
of double (or plural) consciousness upon which Prof. Janet's
researches converge. The question, however, is one that
otherwise might well have engaged attention earlier. Though
first raised in its present form by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux in
his report on the now famous case of Felida X. (see Mind, i.
414, 453), it has of late years forced itself also upon indepen-
dent inquirers in this country. The lamented Edmund
Gurney was led in the course of his hypnotic experiments
(the more positive results of which were first recorded in
Mind, see especially ix. 110, 477) to speculate, in Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research, pt. xi., as to the bearing
of his discovery of extremely involved alternations of con-
scious life on personal identity ; and, again in the same
Proceedings, Mr. F. W. H. Myers has obtained results from
study of automatic writing that come still more directly into
comparison with those of Prof. Janet and others in France.
It was, any way, high time that psychologists of the older
tradition should begin to reckon with the new class of facts.
If the attempt is now made first with the work of a foreigner
like Prof. Janet, this is because of its more systematic char-
acter. Strenuously as it has been conducted, the work of
the English inquirers remains so far at a lower stage of
psychological elaboration.
The title of Prof. Janet's book does not of itself lead us off
familiar ground. Ever since it began to be at all understood
how the nervous system was involved with mental action, it
became a definite question whether bodily acts that seemed
only less complex than those called voluntary had like these
also a psychological character. Already in the middle of
last century, Hartley quite accurately marked off ' automatic '
454 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
from voluntary acts, and among the automatic distinguished
between primary and secondary. Now, as secondary-auto-
matic acts are such as begin by being voluntary for the
individual, these obviously cannot be wholly divested of
psychological character ; yet, as automatic, they as obviously
are related to those other (complex) activities which the indi-
vidual never had to learn. There is no need, for the present
purpose, to complicate the statement by referring to the
change of border-line between the primary-automatic and
the secondary-automatic introduced from the evolutionist
point of view. However the line be drawn between them
for the individual, or between the automatic and the volun-
tary, the question remains whether the automatic are to be
held as related to the voluntary upon the physiological side
only or also as phenomena of subjective import. It is a
question that was rather hotly debated in this country some
twenty years ago. On the one hand, the physiological
relationship was by some brought so strongly into relief
that it was argued as if physiology, which seemed to give a
sufficient account of automatic action, could give the only
scientific account of conscious action also ; consciousness
(when present) being represented as a mere accident or
' epiphenomenon,' interesting enough, no doubt, in a way,
but without real significance. On the other hand, it was
contended, with more or less consistency (or inconsistency),
that, as consciousness could never rightly be so regarded,
scientific analogy required that subjectivity in some form
or degree should be predicated of all those ' automatic '
physiological acts which stood obviously related to the more
complex cerebral acts called (from the subjective point of
view) voluntary or conscious. On both sides, though some
reference was made to particular facts of experience, the
discussion was essentially speculative, and in this respect did
not differ much from the kind of general argument which,
long earlier, Leibniz had urged in favour of a subconscious
or unconscious mental life. Now it is here that Prof. Janet
makes a distinct advance with his " psychological automat-
ism ". While ranging himself on the side of those who refuse
to take consciousness as commensurate with mind, he arrives
at the position by a line of strictly experimental inquiry.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 455
The " automatism " with which he is able so definitely to
experiment is, indeed, peculiar. It is not any action that is
referable to lower centres in the nervous system (from the
basal ganglia downwards), such as in earlier controversy has
chiefly been considered. The motor response which Prof.
Janet evokes in his ' subjects," and which, in spite of their
not being consciously aware of it while it proceeds — or, to
speak more strictly (since he wavers in the use of the word
" consciously"), in spite of their not remembering it after it
is over — he yet claims as properly "psychological," is called
forth by impressions that must be supposed to reach their
appropriate ' centres ' in the cerebral cortex. The auto-
matism of the case lies, for him, in a dissociation from the
general stream of conscious experience and activity that
makes up the normal personality of the individual. Three
abnormal conditions, related but different, are found in that
class of hysterical patients to which (aided, in the happiest
and most effective way, by two practising physicians, Drs.
Gibert and Powilewicz) he has in the main confined his
inquiry. The first is the cataleptic, the psychological sig-
nificance of which lies in the extreme simplicity of the
phenomena presented. In catalepsy (whether natural or
induced), the ' subject,' otherwise unconscious, responds
with specific movements to specific sensory impressions (or
imposed emotional attitudes) ; thus manifesting, according
to Prof. Janet, under strict experimental conditions, the true
elementary mode of mental action, which Condillac vainly
sought with his supposition of the marble statue endowed
with first one and then another kind of passive sense-experi-
ence. The hypnotic state (proper) comes second, represent-
ing for Prof. Janet the next higher stage of mental complica-
tion ; in which the motor response — so much more complex
than in catalepsy that the ' subject ' might appear quite
normal to an outsider — depends no longer on mere sense-
impressions, but on images involving (with or apart from
direct sense-impressions) the whole mechanism of memory.
And from this, as Prof. Janet contends, is further to be
distinguished a third state, that may be called the suggested ;
in which, with no other modification of normal conscious-
ness beyond a certain narrowing, the ' subject ' is automatic-
456 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
ally determined to specific action by direct percept and most
of all by the spoken word, — though here, as already in the
hypnotic state, the act, as it grows more complex, is found
less certainly to follow. Now a ' subject ' may be wholly
possessed for the time being with some one of these states,
or, as Prof. Janet finds, the characteristics of one or other
of them may appear concurrently with the normal conscious-
ness of the individual (such as that may happen to be).
Hence a division of his whole treatise under the two main
heads of (1) " Total Automatism," (2) " Partial Automatism ".
Chief psychological interest, at least as regards the question
of plural consciousness, attaches to Prof. Janet's " Partial
Automatism," but also in the first division of his work he
brings into view many facts of striking significance, and
discusses them with no ordinary insight. Of the truth of his
initial position (supposing the facts to be all, as they seem
to be, most carefully ascertained) there can be no question :
it is in such isolated instances of movement following
straight upon impression as catalepsy presents, and not in
any bare sense-impression by itself, that we must look for
the mental unit. What is practically the same truth had
already, for a considerable time back, been accepted by
psychologists, chiefly through demonstration, from the
physiological point of view, that reflex action is the
type of all nerve-process up to the highest ; but, none the
less, it is a very desirable and effective verification that is
supplied by Prof. Janet's psychological study of cataleptic
patients. Still more remarkable is his detailed treatment of
Hypnotism. Chaps, ii., iii., on "Forgetting and Plurality
of Successive Psychological Existences" (pp. 67-138), and
on " Suggestion and Narrowing of the Field of Conscious-
ness" (pp. 141-220), are a weighty contribution to the
understanding of a subject which, if it has now fairly es-
tablished its claim to the serious scientific regard withheld
from it (through prejudice) at an earlier time, is, so far, any-
thing but matter of scientific agreement. Qii the main
questions now at issue among contending theorists, Prof.
Janet has been led, by his own observations, to some
rather decided conclusions. Without subscribing to the
details of the Salpetriere doctrine, he yet holds with this.
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 457
rather than with the opposite doctrine of the Nancy school
and others (like Gurney and Prof. Delboeuf), on the point
of the essentially abnormal, to the extent of morbid, char-
acter of the hypnotic state. He puts it, indeed, only in
the form that there must be some "psychological disaggrega-
tion " before a person will pass naturally or can be thrown
into the condition of hypnotism, but on the point itself his
experience, so far as it has gone, leaves him pretty confident
(p. 451). This, however, is one of his later conclusions, not
brought into view while he is still at the stage of " Total
Automatism ". Here his main concern is to seize the truly
distinctive feature of the hypnotic state, and this he finds
to be a certain more or less complex modification of the
function of memory. The hypnotic ' subject ' (1) in revert-
ing to the normal condition has no memory of what went
on in trance, but (2) recovers such memory on going into
the trance again. Exceptions to the universality of (1), as
urged especially by Prof. Delboeuf (cp. Mind, xiv. 470), are
rejected by Prof. Janet as apparent only. He has himself
still another mark to add, though less constant, (3) that
the ' subject ' in trance remembers what has gone on in the
normal state. The facts as to memory have been noted
before, by no one, as he recognises, more impressively than
by Gurney. What is peculiar to Prof. Janet is his in-
sistence on them as constituting the whole specific difference
of the state. Not that he would deny other modifications
of the ' subject's ' conscious life, especially when the state
is profound ; but, short of this, the break of memory on
reversion to the normal state, with resumption of memory
when the normal state is again in abeyance, is for him proof
all-sufficient that the (normally) forgotten condition of con-
scious life was hypnotic proper. And, in so saying, it is not
only the various physical signs relied upon by some that he
rejects as indistinctive. He not less confidently waives
aside the loss of independent volition, which is commonly
taken as the characteristic and, in a practical point of view,
critically important psychological note of hypnotic trance.
For it is here that his other position is declared. There is
a state in which ' subjects ' are found to act (at least within
limits) as if they had no will of their own ; but, according to
458 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
Prof. Janet, it is not hypnotism. While hypnotics may be
found unsuggestible, there are suggestibles who cannot be
hypnotised. And if " suggestibility " thus fails as the test
of hypnotism, it is a state that itself equally stands in need
of explanation. Prof. Janet's account of it is that it is not
found except where there is evidence of marked narrowing
of the whole conscious field. This may result from <; distrac-
tion" or what not — the limitation is for Prof. Janet the
essential condition upon which the automatism of response,
to verbal command or other imposed percept, depends.
The state, in fact, as he urges, resembles the normal con-
sciousness of children (or, as he might have added, the
mental condition of lower animals), of which, with manifest
limitation of general range, impulsive action is the most
salient feature. It is only the matter of causation that
Prof. Janet fails to prove in the case — that child or sug-
gestible adult is irresistibly impelled to act because of the
absence or reduced number of other conscious modifications
at the time. At least, of people in general, it can hardly be
said that their pliability from without is in proportion
to their narrowness of mental view, when dogged persist-
ence of aim is found so often to accompany this. (And,
perhaps, the use of the word ' dogged ' might suggest doubt
as to the sufficiency of the explanation for the lower animals
either.) Nevertheless, Prof. Janet's arguments are not to
be lightly passed by ; but all that he urges must be well
considered for any satisfactory theory that may yet be
devised to cover all the facts of hypnotism. For, if he does
not rest content with the suggestion-theory that has so far
gained the upper hand, he yet does not deny or ignore any
of the psychological facts upon which it is based. Nor is it
in any resort to a mystic supposition of physical influence —
but, on the contrary, in a steadfast adherence to the ground
of psychological experience — that he looks for a solution
of the differences of view that as yet so sharply divide
hypnotic inquirers.
The general outcome of the prior study of " Total Auto-
matism" is that, while down to the lowest of the three states
noted and discussed there is psychological (not mere physio-
logical) process going forward, the result even in the highest
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 459
of them stops short of the full and perfect work of conscious
elaboration. Psychic activity, which at every grade takes
the form of synthesis of experience, attains its highest de-
velopment in a reference of the whole variety and mass of
experiences to a unitary self or person. So far, then, as
more or less independent strands of mental process are
disclosed in the various kinds of automatism that alternate
in hysterical 'subjects' with their common self-consciousness,
not only is there the interest of studying the abnormal
formations by themselves, but they may be made to shed a
new light upon the central problem of psychology. And
still more, if evidence is next forthcoming that they can
have an effective existence simultaneously with the subject's
regular consciousness. The mustering of such evidence,
with interpretation of it for the understanding both of what
may be thus abnormal and of what is normal in mental
life, is the task that Prof. Janet sets himself in his second
and rather larger division of " Partial Automatism".
Readers must be sent to the book itself for the extra-
ordinary story of different "psychological existences" which
Prof. Janet has found to concur, as well as alternate, in this
or that ' subject ' of his. They come first distinctly into
view in connexion with the treatment of hypnotism in pt.
i., the peculiar phenomena of memory there disclosed giving
the means of marking their distinctness. Leonie, for ex-
ample, a demure peasant woman of middle age, suffering
from hysterical anaesthesia of the left side in her common
or now normal condition, becomes gay and saucy in a
somnambulic state into which she is apt to pass or can
easily be thrown, and can from this be thrown further (with
intermediate stages of lethargy and catalepsy) into still
another hypnotic state, in which there appears a greater
fulness of conscious life, — at least in the way of memory.
For, while Leonie 1 knows nothing of Leonie 2 or 3 ; and
Leonie 2, cognisant of Leonie 1 as a humdrum other person,
knows nothing of Leouie 3 ; this last adds to experience of
her own a cognisance of all that has happened in the experi-
ence of Leonie 2 and Leonie 1, though taking them for
different persons from herself and from each other. Other
' subjects,' Lucie and Rose, with different morbid history
460 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
and symptoms, present equally, or still more, complex
mental alternations, of like general character but varying in
some particulars. Now, the abnormal states of these ' sub-
jects,'— whether of the hypnotic type just mentioned, or of
the simpler cataleptic type, or of the other distinguished as
" suggested," — being all marked by an activity that is more
or less automatic, there is in this afforded a means of deter-
mining the effective presence of one or other of the states
concurrently with the normal conscious life of the individual.
The facts of such concurrence are given in a chapter on
"Subconscious Acts" (p. 224-G9). By easily-arranged ex-
periments with his ' subjects ' otherwise normally conscious,
Prof. Janet gets well-pronounced partial catalepsies (of in-
sensitive hand, arm, &c.) ; and, again, by mere "distraction"
of the main conscious stream, obtains execution of more or
less complex suggested acts. He thereupon studies at
length the facts of "post-hypnotic suggestion," meaning
acts which, suggested under hypnotism, are unerringly per-
formed in the waking state or in reinstated trance. The
different classes of fact join on to one another, and leave
him at the end with the general conclusion, not only that
there are real psychological processes going on outside the
ken of the subject's regular personal consciousness, but that
these may have a quasi-personal unity of their own.
So far, it is with this notion of independent synthesis ac-
complished to greater or less degree by the side of the main
stream of consciousness that he advances beyond the tra-
ditional thesis of Unconscious (or Subconscious) Mind. He
makes a further advance when he next goes on to seek for
an interpretation of the plural experience which the different
kinds of automatic activity — but chiefly the activity of
hypnotism — give evidence of in the hysterical ' subjects '
under investigation. The peculiar modifications of memory,
before noted as sign of the hypnotic state, being now held
to prove that the complex automatic acts abnormally exe-
cuted imply the presence of other " psychological existences "
besides the normal one, the question is, what explanation
can be given of the interwoven breaks and resumptions of
memory? Here the anaesthesias of Prof. . Janet's 'subjects'
assume a critical importance. It is to be borne in mind that
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 461
the normal consciousness of those 'subjects,' though rounded
off into the usual personal form, is maimed and imperfect to
the extent of their want of sensibility ; the anaesthesia
affecting not only the skin (part or whole) but also, it may
be, other organs of special sense, including that one of
highest objective efficacy, the eye. Now, first, it may turn
out with ' subjects ' of this class that, on passing or being
thrown into the abnormal hypnotic state, they acquire a
fuller consciousness, by ceasing to manifest the anaesthesia
of the normal (hysterical) state ; and if, as in the case of
Leonie, &c., they are susceptible of different degrees of
hypnotic affection, it may be in the most advanced and
rarest of these (for them) abnormal states that they most
nearly approach to the normal condition of healthy people.
Certain it is, according to Prof. Janet's experience, that only
when, after being in any particular state of whatever degree,
they again pass or are thrown into a state of the same kind
or degree, do they have memory of what went on in its
previous occurrence. This assertion holds without qualifica-
tion (as one may say) downwards : i.e., in any state, includ-
ing the ' subject's ' normal one of lower sense-potency, there
will be no memory of what went on in the hypnotic state of
higher sense-potency. Only in some still higher one, like
that of Leonie 3 or Rose 4, may there be, along with exclu-
sive memory of its own, memory also of all that has gone on
in any lower state down to the so-called normal (Leonie 1,
Rose 1). The memory, in fact, seems to be a function (as
mathematicians would say) of the amount and kind of effec-
tive sense present in any of the states. And this conclusion
can further be supported by more specially arranged experi-
ments. Prof. Janet's ' subjects ' being open to suggestions
in their common and also in their hypnotic states, he can
produce in them " systematised anaesthesias," meaning sug-
gested loss of sensibility within strictly defined areas, especi-
ally of skin or eye. The phenomenon was well known to
the older mesmerists ; a reference to whom at all points
is, by the way, one of the most interesting features of Prof.
Janet's exposition. His own merit is in employing it as
test for his view of memory as giving, by presence or absence,
the one means of distinguishing between different "psycho-
462 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
logical existences ". So far as can be judged from the record
of his experiments, these seem to have been conducted with
all due care, and they may be taken to warrant his conclu-
sion as to the relation between memory and (effective) sense
in his 'subjects'. It may be the more readily accepted
because, after all, it only bears out the current psychological
doctrine that the representative image, as it directly revives
the sense-percept for consciousness, involves excitation of
the same cerebral parts. Since there can be no doubt that
the anaesthesia of hysterical ' subjects ' depends upon central
rather than peripheral disturbance of the nerve-system, what
hypnotism may be supposed to do for them is to restore the
working of parts of the cerebral mechanism that have got out
of gear, and thus promote mental efficiency for the time
being. So far, on the other hand, as quite healthy persons
may be hypnotisable at all, the effect in their case might
rather be to throw the cerebral mechanism out of gear, with
general loss of mental power, though with the possibility of
abnormal heightening of particular functions set free for the
time from regularly balanced control. However this may
be, the relation that seems to be established, by experiment
with those hysterical 'subjects,' between memory and per-
ception, or (as it may be put more generally) between repre-
sentative and presentative experience, has, over and above
the light it throws on the varying complications and disin-
tegrations of their mental life, an undeniable importance
for psychology in general.
But the question still remains, how the plurality of
" psychological existence " is to be reconciled with personal
unity. Not to leave untouched what Prof. Janet has further
to say on this main point, many other interesting observations
on the behaviour of his ' subjects,' all discussed with much
psychological acuteness, must be passed over. His whole
next chapter (pp. 367-433), on "Various Forms of Psycho-
logical Disaggregation," can also be little more than
mentioned. Here he reviews the different phenomena that
in all ages have suggested the notion that certain forms of
human action reveal the agency of external spirits, demons
or what not, working through the human medium. That
all of them — from the wonders of the divining rod, &c.,
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM. 463
through present-day spiritism, to the facts of impulsive
madness, fixed idea, hallucination and possession — are
(dupery apart) explicable from resolution of normal con-
scious life, in the ' subjects ' of them, into separate strands
of experience (passive and active) that run on together with-
out mutual cognisance, is shown by Prof. Janet at length
with excellent effect. For him they are but cases, more or
less pronounced, of what he then goes on, in a final chapter
(pp. 444-78) of pt. ii., to describe as "Moral Weakness" in
opposition to "Moral Force". "Moral weakness," or
"psychological misery," is that state of general disorganisa-
tion in which the mental life splits up into a number of
groups of " sensations and images " working themselves out
with an automatic regularity and relative independence.
The antithesis is that "moral force" of the healthy indi-
vidual, in whom, though automatism is also there (as seen
in the phenomena of distraction, instinct, habit, passion),
there is one supreme controlling activity whereby the whole
mental economy is held together. What, then, is the nature
of this highest activity, in the abeyance of which it is that
the elements of normal personality are so prone to fall
asunder? Prof. Janet, for his part, can find it only in a
volition that has no direct relation to such ideas (viz., per-
cepts and images) as are always in themselves automatically
motor, but on the contrary depends upon a perfectly dis-
parate class of "ideas of relations" or "judgments," not by
themselves motor. He takes up, in fact, a position analogous,
as he says, to the apperception- theory of Prof. Wundt or to
the reflexion of Maine de Biran (who, it is evident through-
out, has had a special influence on his whole manner of
psychologising). Some slight indication is then offered (p.
474) as to how the volition thus determined by pure intellect
may get into working relation with the images and per-
cepts that have motor efficiency. It is, however, all too
vague to afford a basis of useful discussion. And as some-
thing more may soon be said in these pages on the general
question of will and automatism, anent Dr. H. Miinster-
berg's notable researches (cp. Mind, No. 56, p. 607),1 there
is the more excuse for abstaining from discussion at the end
1 See above, " Dr. H. Miinsterberg on Apperception ".
464 PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISM.
of a notice which, though not short, has been rendered by
circumstances much more perfunctory than was intended.
Its main purpose, however, will after all have been attained
if the reader is not left in doubt that some of the deepest
questions of psychology, and of philosophy too (in which
connexion a short general " Conclusion," pp. 479-88, is not
to be overlooked), have been placed in a new light by the
labours of Prof. Pierre Janet.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN
OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE.1
DR. PIKLER'S essay, mentioned in Mind, No. 60, p. 571,
is a still more carefully reasoned piece of work than it
seemed at first sight. Taken along with Mr. Stout's earlier-
published but later- written article on " The Genesis of the
Cognition of Physical Reality" in No. 57, it prompts to re-
turn upon a subject that had previous discussion here under
title of " The Psychological Theory of Extension " (Nos. 51-3),
but which at starting (No. 51, p. 418) 2 might have been as
well designated " The Psychological Theory of Sensible Ob-
ject ". This, at all events, is the topic which I hope, before
long, to take up again in Mind and to treat more adequately
than in the two or three pages of general indication offered
before. Dr. Pikler gives special occasion for such return,
because nobody is so express and decided as he in main-
taining a position which, so far as I can still see, is in the
scientific point of view seriously mistaken. Thus, at p.
38, he declares that "our belief in the objective existence
of matter or things arises only in consequence of our
belief in the objective existence of space," which he
makes the subject of prior psychological explanation.
Apparently he attaches no importance, if he gave any
attention, to the particular line of argument here advanced
in a sense precisely opposite. That is a reason, added to
one's failure to make serious impression upon the others
(Mr. Ward and Prof. James), against whom at the time the
argument was more especially pointed, for trying to restate
it in more effective form. But, since the question is to be
limited to Sensible Object (though that may turn out to
1 Part I. " OVjectiva Capable of Presentation." By JULIUS PIKLER,
Doctor of Political Science, Lecturer on Philosophy of Law in the Koyal
University of Budapest, &c. London : Williams & Norgate, 1890. Pp.
118. (Mind, xvi. 100.)
2 See above, p. 279.
30
466 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE.
involve a good deal more), it will simplify matters as regards
Dr. Pikler, who must henceforth be considered among the
foremost authorities on the whole subject, to give beforehand
some account of the more general scope of his essay. Open,
as I think, to exception both in principle and result, it is
yet in more ways than one a very remarkable production.
It is, first of all, remarkable as written in English by a
Hungarian hand. Whether his choice of language has been
made from an opinion of the superior pliability of English
to psychological uses or because the problem of the essay
has so largely occupied the attention of English thinkers,
Dr. Pikler's readers may thank him for it ; nor does he suffer
by the choice. Though his sentences are at times rather
laboured or even awkward, they do not fail at other times
to be singularly pointed and effective ; and, marked as his
thought not seldom is by almost an excess of subtlety, it is
really interesting to note how he always manages to make
plain his meaning even to its finest shades. But, however
it be with his means of expression, there is no question of
Dr. Pikler's special indebtedness to the psychological work
of the English school. This is manifest throughout from
the very freedom with which he criticises its chief represen-
tatives. To J. S. Mill in particular, despite all difference,
he stands in such close relation that his whole theory, so far
as yet expounded, may be described as an effort to give full
and satisfactory development to Mill's well-known doctrine
in the Examination of Hamilton. And it is an effort that
may be welcomed, as well as judged on the whole successful,
even by those to whom the right solution of the object-
problem does not seem attainable on Mill's lines.
What most distinguishes Dr. Pikler from Mill and the
other English psychologists is the generality with which he
conceives the problem. More careful, than they to mark it
off from the question of perception (to distinguish, e.g.,
between the mere perceiving of space and the belief in its
objectivity), he is still more decided on the point that the
problem is not exhausted with an opposition of matter and
mind. His own fundamental division ofobjectiva is into the
two classes of — (1) capable, (2) incapable, of presentation ;
and each includes for him a large variety of particular cases.
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE. 467
In the present volume, only the first class of objectives is
covered ; the question of belief iti the existence of minds and
other unpresentables being left over for future handling. He
maintains that the psychological problem of material object
can be completely solved without reference of any kind to
other consciousness than that of the individual subject.
But, whereas Mill, with whom he shares that opinion, took
up, at the prior stage, only the question of the external
world, Dr. Pikler finds this to be but one of a number of
equally presentable objectives, and by no means the first of
them to call for scientific regard. Not only, as already
mentioned, does he put the question of space (and time)
before matter, but, prior to time and space as objects, he
holds that we may become conscious of objective attributes
pertaining to our bare (subjective) presentations ; and he
charges it against all previous psychologists that they have
overlooked this true beginning of a science of object. It is
not surprising, then, that, working up from such a depth, he
should not stop short with the material things of sense, but
should bring within his theory of presentable object the
" existence of cognitions (beliefs, memories, ideas)," and also
such facts as that we can ascribe an " objective intensity " to
presentations other than what we may be (subjectively) ex-
periencing, or, again, that we may speak of mental states as
actually or objectively present though "unconscious ".
Nothing but praise is due for the care with which it is thus
sought to muster together all the different classes of objec-
tives agreeing in presentability. And, if the enumeration, as
a whole, stands good, whether in Dr. Pikler's or in any other
order, he must be allowed to have made a sensible advance
in treatment of the object-problem with his fundamental
distinction of presentables and unpresentables. It is less
clear that he is right in thinking that this or that particular
class of presentable objectives has been overlooked altogether
by his predecessors. He asserts this especially of his first
class— what he calls " attribute-presentations " or " objective
attributes of our presentations ". There are, in his view,
eight of these altogether, as he thinks well — though his im-
mediate task does not require it of him — to mention (p. 19) :
resemblance or difference, time-relation, local (space-) relation,
468 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE.
duratiop, intensity, extension (sic), position, number. It
cannot very seriously be maintained that these (or at least
some of them) have not been recognised by psychologists as
having a certain objective character abstracted from the
(subjective) presentations to which they can be attributed.
But it is of more interest to ask whether such objective
character is so well and clearly marked as to be made, with
Dr. Pi'kler, the prerogative instance of objective experience.
Dr. Pikler's reason for putting first this class of objectives
is not expressly stated, but may be guessed with sufficient
probability. The psychological problem of objectivity is, in
spite of some rather ambiguous language at starting, rightly
conceived by him as a question of how presentations, which
are essentially facts of subjective experience, come to appear
as having an existence (or subsistence) apart from the mind's
perceiving. Now if (subjective) presentations, without ceas-
ing to appear to be such, can be shown to have certain fixed
attributes, whether intrinsically or in their relation to one
another, that are not in the same way subjective as the pre-
sentations themselves, this fact would seem to be objectivity
at the first remove, and to require, as well as admit of,
explanation before any other part of the whole problem.
But, should this be allowed, and the question as to space
and body be then made to follow, one does not very well see
why Dr. Pikler's later classes of objectives, which all have
reference to phases of subjective consciousness, should not
also be explained before the interpolated cases of " time and
space" and "the external world". Can it however be
allowed that the treatment of the whole problem should be
so begun ? Surely not. Be it as it may between space and
body (of which more anon) , it is not to be doubted that only
after we have apprehension, somehow, of an external world
is there any express consciousness of presentations or repre-
sentations as facts of subjective experience in which may
then be remarked attributes or phases with a character
of relative independence and fixity. The attempt, in short,
by Dr. Pikler to work out a complete scheme of pre-
sentable objectives, whatever its general merit, results in
an ordering that can hardly be called other than highly
artificial. It neither corresponds with the (historical) order
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE. 469
of actual development in any consciousness ; nor, by placing
some of its later terms so far apart from the first, does it
satisfy the requirements' of an order of logical development.
The two points of view — logical and historical — are, in fact,
confused in Dr. Pikler's scheme. I take leave to say this,
in spite of his careful distinction, at starting, between the
meaning and the genesis of belief in objective existence.
His treatment of " the genetic question " in one chapter at
the end of the present essay understands this in a far too
limited sense and is besides of a rather perfunctory character ;
while his remark quoted above from p. 38 shows him, in
practice, not by any means careful enough to keep out an
admixture of genetic considerations at the analytic stage.
A word now on Dr. Pikler's principle of explanation for
all cases alike of presentable objective. Belief in such
objective existence is, he holds, belief in one's ability to
obtain this or that kind of presentation at will. Here may
first be acknowledged, over again, the seriousness with
which he conceives his psychological task. The essential
meaning of objective — however afterwards aggrandised, in
some cases, by reference to a common consciousness of
different rninds — may and should, he thinks, admit of being
accounted for in terms of individual consciousness. Nor,
in limiting his means of explanation to psychical fact or
process of the most immediately personal kind, does Dr.
Pikler at all minimise the problem. It is a true objective,
independent of the individual's consciousness, which he is
concerned to evolve from the consciousness of the individual.
This is to take the psychological question seriously. And
it need not be denied that a consistent meaning for pre-
sentable object may be found in Dr. Pikler's terms. Indeed,
as he puts it, the assertion is little, if at all, more than an
identical proposition. Whatever is by me presentable object
in the world without, or whatever in the world within I may
be ready to call objective because of its determinate possi-
bility— sc. practicability — of presentation, is, in so many
words, something that I can through act of will come to
have a presentative experience of. If, on the other hand,
the assertion be understood to have real import, it has
hardly waited for Dr. Pikler to be made. Prof. Bain, for
470 PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BELIEF IN OBJECTIVE EXISTENCE.
example, has told us (Mental and Moral Science, p. 199), as
regards the external world, that " our object-experience
consists of the uniform connexion of definite feelings with
definite energies," and, in the wider reference to object in
general, has given his well-known analysis of Belief under
the head of Will. Obversely ; it is cleverly urged by Dr.
Pikler that the most- distinctively ' subjective ' of all experi-
ences— our state of good or bad humour — is just that over
which we have least voluntary control. It may be allowed,
then, that there is no difficulty in putting such an inter-
pretation upon ' presentable object ' as Dr. Pikler seeks to
carry through. But the question remains whether this is
the primary and most natural interpretation — whether the
notion of a ' possibility ' of experience through will of mine
is not secondary to the notion of a ' necessity ' of experience
which, in given circumstances, no will of mine can overcome.
What says Dr. Pikler himself, at p. 71, when arguing that a
man's " own world of memories and beliefs " is as truly ob-
jective for him as that external world which is common to
him with others? "The particular parts of it are just as
well defined, and exist objectively as independently of our will,
as the particular things of the external world." The words
I here italicise, falling so naturally from Dr. Piklers pen,
are in curious conflict with the theory he works out in the
essay. And note, too, the bearing of the last clause of the
sentence. " The particular things of the external world " are,
for Dr. Pikler also, so much the type of what is truly objective
that it lies to hand to remark- that, by his .own allowance
here, the solution of the psychological problem of object
should start therefrom. But, however much one may be
concerned, on another occasion, to urge this point, it would
be wrong to part from Dr. Pikler now and not repeat with
emphasis that his treatise, as a whole, must henceforth be
very carefully reckoned with by anybody who would essay
the crowning question of psychology.
THE IDEOLOGISTS.1
THE author of this important volume essays a task of no
common magnitude. Barely has there been a greater, or at
least a more varied, intellectual outburst than marked the
revolutionary era of French history. M. Picavet traces its
origin, follows it along the multifarious lines that it took,
and seeks to appreciate the abiding value of its results.
The industry he displays is immense, and hardly less re-
markable the historical and critical insight. Writing also
clearly and with force, there is not an aspect of the move-
ment that he does not effectively portray, not one of its
hundred figures, small or great, that he does not manage
to invest with interest. But it must be added that the very
thoroughness of his work over so wide a field has at times
a somewhat overpowering effect. And when it comes to
looking back upon the whole moving scene, one sighs for
index as a means of keeping hold of it all. Why, with all
its fine gift of exposition, is the French mind hardly more
careful than the German to employ that simple help for
making its labours of ready service to the busy student?
The revolutionary movement of thought in France, called
Ideological by \Destutt de Tracy, one of its chief leaders, has
a special interest for us in this country, as M. Picavet is
forward to point out. If English thinking has in this gen-
eration recovered in France something of the same kind of
authority that was yielded before the middle of last century
to the thought of Locke, it has done so in forms that were
moulded not least by influences received from France itself.
In fact, during the modern period an alternate process of
lLes Ideologues. Essai sur 1'Histoire des Idees et des Theories scien-
tifiques, philosophiques, religieuses, &c., en France depuis 1789. Par F.
PICAVET, Docteur es lettres, Agrege de philosophic, Maitre de conferences
a FEcole des hautes etudes, Laur^at de 1'Institut. Paris : F. Alcan, 1891.
Pp. xii., 628. (Mind, N.S., i. 118.)
472 THE IDEOLOGISTS.
give-and-take between the two countries has always been
going on. Locke, who seemed to overcome Descartes in
France, had owed more to Descartes than to any other of
his predecessors. So the later English psychology, which
has supplied so manifest a stimulus to the French activity
of mental research at the present day, had its own line of
progress, at an earlier time, very markedly affected by the
Ideologists. Hamilton was quite right when he signalised
the origin, in D. de Tracy, of Thomas Brown's theory of
external object, taken up afterwards and developed by J. S.
Mill, Prof. Bain and others. The discovery does not seem
to have been made by Hamilton till his later days (Reid,
Note D, p. 868 n.), but already in his early onslaught upon
Brown (Art. "Philosophy of Perception," 1830) there is
some general reference to the school which he gives Cousin,
after Royer-Collard, the credit of overcoming. Such over-
throw, in as far as it took place, is but another effect of the
interchange of thought between the two countries, since
Royer-Collard (from 1811) was stirred to his revolt against
the Sensationalist tradition in France by no other than the
influence of Thomas Reid. As for the Hamilton of 1830,
it is not out of place to add that one cannot easily now read
without smiling the tones of portentous solemnity in which
he speaks of those high interests of morality and religion
which, under Locke's influence, had been wrecked for
nearly a century in France, till the great Cousin at last
stood forth to stay and save. It is not creditable to Hamil-
ton's discernment that he should at any time have let him-
self be imposed upon by that flighty rhetorician. Had he
known, too, a little more intimately the work of those,
whether called Sensationalists or Ideologists, whom at that
time, apparently, he was content to take at the estimate of
their foes, he might have recognised that in Degerando and
Laromiguiere, then still active, there was as much concern
for religion (not to say morality) as the belauded Cousin
ever showed ; that Cabanis himself, more than twenty
years before, had supplemented his scientific inquiries into
the relations of mind and body by a grave philosophical
argument (Lettre sur les Causes premieres} for religious in-
terpretation of the universe ; and that in the earlier -genera-
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 473
tion Condillac, for all his psychological insistence upon
sense, was a most ardent spiritualist and theist.
But wherein lies the distinctive character of the Ideo-
logical movement, as we may now understand it with the
help of M. Picavet's practically exhaustive research ? Less
in its method, which had been applied by others before to the
investigation of mind, than in its aims begotten of a time of
high humanitarian enthusiasm. It was essentially a re-
volutionary movement. Education, government, the whole
frame of society were to be recast ; the renovation being
based upon a scientific analysis of "ideas," or developed
human experience, driven, with that all-inclusive practical pur-
pose, deeper than ever before. The enterprise indeed, even in
its practical bearings, was not novel. Locke's " way of ideas,"
which remained the whole method of the French revolution-
ary thinkers, had for him also a practical, quite as much
as a theoretical, significance. And one object, uniting con-
siderations of both theory and practice, namely, the direction
and furtherance of the work of special science, had been as
present to the mind of Hume as of Locke in their new
analytic treatment of human "understanding". But the
progress of the positive sciences had come, by the end of the
eighteenth century, to exert an ever-deepening influence upon
philosophic minds. The French thinkers who, after Con-
dillac, continued to draw their main inspiration from Locke
had it forced upon them to make mental inquiry more and
more expressly scientific in form, on the model of the other
sciences ; while yet contending that these others could be
systematised and co-ordinated only from the point of view of
the mental inquirer. Getting then, after the revolutionary
Terror, the opportunity of building upon a ground that had
been swept bare, they made it their first practical concern to
refound the whole higher instruction of France, and to
organise, in the Institute, the means of universal scientific
advance. In both departments — of research as of instruction
—"Analysis of Sensations and Ideas" (or other equivalent
designation) was put forward to mark the particular line of
scientific inquiry and consideration that should henceforth
take the place of an arbitrary " Metaphysic " in relation to
all other actual or possible varieties of human knowledge
474 THE IDEOLOGISTS.
and endeavour. So may we represent to ourselves, in
general, the nature and scope of the movement.
Leaving aside for the moment M. Picavet's introductory
question of the "Origins," we may first note the chapter
(pp. 20-100) in which he gives account of the Ideologists'
" Eelations, political and private, academic, scientific, and
literary ". It is truly a marvel of painstaking research.
The work remained for M. Picavet to do, and he has done
it once and for all. Nothing that one can desire to know
of the new institutions, educational and other, set on foot
from 1796, or of the men, obscure as well as prominent,
who helped in their founding and working, is here left un-
elucidated. The class of Moral and Political Sciences,
second of three composing the Institute, had but seven
years of life before Napoleon, who as General Bonaparte
could speak about "ideas" with the foremost (p. 80),
abolished it in his pique at being unable to retain the good
opinion and support of the philosophical leaders who, in
their desire for a more settled political order, had helped
him to his supremacy in the State. From that time it was
that "Ideologist" became his favourite term of contempt
for all those whose serious scientific and social purpose
would not bend itself to the service of his personal ambition,
and in a depreciatory sense passed readily enough into
currency with many who had been proud to bear the name.
But Napoleon's impatience of mental independence did not
deprive the school of its means of official utterance before
its work had been in effect done. And it needs but an un-
biassed study of its chief productions to see that at least the
leading spirits, Cabanis and De Tracy, if over-sanguine in
their enthusiasms, had no such deficiency of practical sense
as the title of their choice was made to imply against them.
The work of the Ideologists is, in effect, summed up in
the writings of the two men, Cabanis and De Tracy, and all
the more because of their complementary relation to one
another ; De Tracy confining himself, for the most part, to
properly subjective consideration, while Cabanis made it his
business to discover the physiological conditions of mental
process. But with M. Picavet the work of the two (done
within some ten years from 1796) and of those whom they
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 475
more especially influenced constitutes but one of three stages
that may be distinguished within the whole movement. To
a later " generation " are referred, with others of less note,
Degerando (1772-1842) and Laromiguiere (1757-1836), who,
though already active by the side of De Tracy and Cabanis
in the revolutionary years, did not attain their prominence
till a later time, when it was left to them to continue the
Ideological tradition in face of the strong reaction that had
set in against it, but to continue it in a modified form, at
once "spiritualist and Christian". And a "first generation"
is made of writers, like Condorcet and Volney, whose work,
in conception if not also in execution, reaches back to the
pre-revolutionary period and is to be ranked with that of the
Ideologists proper because of a general similarity in method
and aim.
M. Picavet gives a very interesting chapter (pp. 101-75)
to these immediate forerunners, who were all in more or less
close relations with Cabanis and De Tracy ; but, for the
right understanding of the central pair, it is of greater
moment to note what he otherwise seeks to establish con-
cerning the origin of their thought. The most obvious
question is of their relation to Condillac, the dominant
French thinker of the eighteenth century, and this is a
question which M. Picavet keeps in view all through his
exposition and would very decidedly answer. He speaks
with an exceptional knowledge of Condillac, having some
years ago edited with characteristic care a part of the Traite
des Sensations. He has, moreover, for the present inquiry,
made an elaborate survey of all prior influences, French or
other, that can have affected the Ideologists ; though in his
book, as printed, some two hundred pages which he had
written on this topic have had to be condensed into an
introduction of less than twenty. In the result, according
to him, it is a grave historical mistake to subordinate the
Ideologists to Condillac as master. Though agreeing with
Condillac in the general psychological method he had taken
from Locke, they criticised him with the utmost freedom
and made claim to have advanced indefinitely beyond his
positions. Neither was Condillac himself, from the middle
of the century till his death in 1780, by any means the
476 THE IDEOLOGISTS.
solitary thinker of mark and power in France that he is
commonly represented. And when we go back beyond
Locke, to whom the allegiance of the Ideologists is undoubted,
it is to Hobbes and Bacon, outside of France, that they are
seen to stand most near ; while, in France, it was at least as
much from Descartes as from Gassendi or from the line of
sceptics reaching back through Bayle and others to Charron
and Montaigne that they drew. In all this contention by
M. Picavet there is much freshness of historical insight, and
especially noteworthy is the evidence he adduces that never
in the eighteenth century did Descartes cease to be an active
philosophical force among his countrymen. With the Ideo-
logists, at arty rate, he stood in high credit — in higher credit
(it is interesting to iiote) than with Boyer-Collard, the in-
itiator in the second decade of the nineteenth century of
that spiritualist reaction which later on was fain to connect
itself with his celebrated name. As to the Ideologists' in-
dependence of Condillac, however, M. Picavet's proof is not
very decisive. It is just as easy to find in the pages of De
Tracy and Cabanis professions of discipleship as reclamations
against this or that shortcoming 'of their psychological pre-
decessor. They were in truth very specially beholden to
him ; but, over and above their novel breadth of practical
aim, they had the characteristic — in a remarkable degree for
their time — of seeking to connect their thought with the best
(as they conceived it) of method or principle that they could
find among all the streams of modern inquiry. They looked
upon themselves as the crest of the whole advancing modern
wave. This confidence is curiously manifested in a criticism
on Kant which De Tracy read to the Institute in 1802.
Some of it (as given by M. Picavet, pp. 347 ff.) is not at all
ill-pointed as special criticism, but more significant is the
general judgment passed, as from a higher level, on " les
philosophes allemands " — who retain the prejudices of the
old school-doctrine, do not know of the observations that
have been made in France, take no account of origins,
language, method of calculus, but regard the human mind
as an abstract thing, &c., &c.
Cabanis and De Tracy occupy between them more than a
third of M. Picavet's book (pp. 176-398). His plan is to
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 477
interweave with accounts of their lives abstracts, more or
less critical, of their writings, in order (as far as possible)
of composition. The work is done with so much intelligence
and sympathetic care that for most readers the abstracts
may well supersede the originals, though some can hardly
fail to be led on by them to a direct contact with the writers.
Cabam's (1757-1808), the slightly younger man, was, as long
as he lived, perhaps the more prominent or representative
figure of the two, and he lived long enough to cover not
only the period of his yoke-fellow's effective authorship but
also the whole time of their school's undisputed influence.
He had all the warmth of nature and easy flow of utterance
helpful in the impressing and attaching of other men.
Though philosophic purpose was never absent, literary
production took with him a somewhat wide and varied
range. Of scholarly habit from youth, before taking up the
medical profession, he wrote early and late both as scholar
and as physician ; and in his master-work, the Rapports du
physique et du moral de I'homme, which embodies much of
his own medical experience, the literary touch is present in
a high degree. It brought together a series of memoirs read
to the Institute from 1796, some others being added when the
book was made up in 1802. By that time Cabanis, who
had been very active in support of Bonaparte's coup d'etat
in 1799, had his disillusions ; and, suffering always from
most uncertain health, he appears to have been anxious not
to delay bringing out the results of his protracted inquiry
and reflexion on the mental relations of mind and body.
The book, as it appeared, has much less of system and
orderliness than Cabanis would claim for it ; but it is more
easy to understand the enthusiastic interest with which it
was received at the time than the comparative neglect into
which it has later fallen. With an expert's knowledge of
all that had been discovered or surmised from Hippocrates
downwards as to the human bodily constitution, Cabanis set
himself to bring it into definite relation with the results of
mental introspection pursued in the scientific spirit of Locke
and Condillac. By analysis of his own, he was able to bring
into view, with more clearness and precision than anybody
before him, the whole range of organic sensibility underlying
478 THE IDEOLOGISTS.
the external senses. Completely overlooked by Condillac,
these "internal impressions," the simplest and most truly
primordial of all human experiences, reaching back as they
must do to the period of foetal life, were first understood by
Cabanis in their peculiar psychological significance, more
especially in relation to the earliest (apparently) automatic
activities. But his merit lies less in a special discovery like
this, important as it is, than in his grasp of the general
position that, in their relation to bodily conditions and
processes, the facts of mental experience are to be taken
directly as such, apart from metaphysical construction. The
" relations " to be established are purely phenomenal. His
clear perception of this fundamental condition of scientific
treatment lends a value to his results which is hardly
lessened by the imperfect knowledge of the nervous system
which belonged to his time. He distinctly, anticipated the
position at which all psychophysical inquirers now place
themselves ; and, though in particular unguarded expres-
sions, like that when he speaks of the brain as "en quelque
sorte digesting impressions" and as "performing organically
the secretion of thought," he lets himself be overborne for
the moment by the obviousness of the physical, yet even in
the Rapports, still more in the later Causes premieres, he
shows himself well aware of the unique import of conscious
sensibility. The "relations" established are, indeed, for
the most part of a very general kind ; but this was inevitable
at starting. As a general basis for the most developed
doctrine of physiological psychology thus far attained, his
exposition may still effectively serve. Certainly, nothing
in its way so striking has yet been produced by other hand.
Nor, for all the undeserved neglect with which he has been
treated by later inquirers, has even this been unrelieved.
An edition of the Rapports (and Causes premieres), issued in
1844 by L. Peisse, is a model of careful and judicious com-
menting, all the more valuable because of the perfect freedom
of animadversion which the editor feels bound to allow him-
self. This is the edition to be recommended to the student
who wants to go beyond M. Picavet's admirable analysis.
Count Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) has had still less
justice than Cabanis from historians of philosophy. Lewes
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 479
is almost alone in giving prominence to either, but, while he
seizes fairly enough the importance of Cabanis, says nothing
to the purpose in his two pages on De Tracy. Yet De
Tracy was a very remarkable man, and a thinker whose
performance is only less remarkable than his ambition. He
now stands very well revealed in the biographical facts and
characteristics recorded of him by M. Picavet, to which
there is only wanting some more definiteness of detail
towards the end. A self-contained man, of high and
strenuous purpose, he had already been given to scientific
study while playing the gay soldier at court. When the
revolution burst, he was forward to resign all aristocratic
privilege and range himself with the popular party, though
never exaggerating the social and political evils that had to
be redressed. Not all his patriotic ardour and self-sacrifice
availed to save him from incarceration and imminent peril
of death at the height of the Terror. When he escaped
condemnation by the fall of Robespierre and was set free
again, the studies which he had calmly pursued in prison
had brought him so far as to see, by help of Condillac and
Locke, that a "Science of ideas" was the thing above all
needful for the advancement of knowledge generally and
for the conduct of life. This accordingly he proceeded
to develop, with gradually widening view, in a series of
Institute-memoirs from 1796, revised and recast for publica-
tion in 1798. He had then hold of his main conceptions,
but their practical applications, educational and other, did
not become clear to him till he was called to act (1799-1800)
on the Council of Public Instruction ; and it was with an
eduoational purpose that he then gave to his philosophical
views their systematic form in three parts (Ideology proper,
Grammar, Logic) of tiUments d'IdSologie, 1801-5. Later
on he added a fourth part, of Economics, and the beginning
of a fifth part, of Morals, towards a treatise of " Will and
its Effects," as his first three parts had together made up a
treatise of "Understanding"; but, though he had still, in
1817, some twenty years of life before him, his powers were
then confessedly spent, and indeed it is hardly beyond 1805
that his philosophical impulse is to be reckoned. Up to
that time it worked with freedom and efficiency. Two
480 THE IDEOLOGISTS.
features of his thought are specially to be noted. (1) It is
undoubtedly from him that the import of conscious muscular
activity for the psychological problem of object first got
distinct recognition. Condillac in France, Hume and
Berkeley in England, had (after Locke) each more or less
clearly faced the problem ; Rousseau, whose psychological
tact (in Emile) deserves more acknowledgment than it has
got, had descried the perceptual value of the motor factor.
But it was De Tracy that first put all together and, though
not without some wavering, laid the foundations of a scien-
tific theory which many hands have since helped to rear. To
the conception of object as primarily obstacle, one finds, on
reading, that he had already given the most definite ex-
pression ; and there are other points of moment in the
theory, as the prior objective character of the subject's own
body in relation to all others, which he anticipated with
equal clearness. (2) Before Comte, and in a profounder
way than Comte, he conceived of human knowledge as an
inter-related system of positive sciences. The very desig-
nation "positive," which has made its fortune in the
present century, is in use with De Tracy and others of the
school. Comte, there can be no doubt, took it from that
source, and if he had learned also the need of starting with
what De Tracy liked to call the " History of our Means of
Knowing," his work of scientific ordering might better
have claimed its assumed title of Philosophy. Particular
ideas, too, commonly regarded as most characteristic of
Comte, are plainly foreshadowed in De Tracy or Cabanis.
These M. Picavet does not overlook ; and, altogether, he
is well justified in placing the great Positivist among the
"Auxiliaries, Disciples and Continuers " of the two Ideo-
logical leaders.
The hundred pages under this title (399-497), in which he
proceeds to muster these, with excellent effect, from all
departments of science and literature, can here only be
mentioned ; nor can more be done for his final chapter (pp.
498-570) on the " Third Generation," in which are grouped
round Degerando (Dugald Stewart's friend) and Laromiguiere
a number of minor figures, spanning the whole time till with
MM. Taine, Bibot and others the movement of scientific
THE IDEOLOGISTS. 481
psychology in France was started afresh under foreign
stimulus. Among the direct adherents of Cabanis and De
Tracy the man of greatest mark is Maine de Biran; the
chief interest of his work, however, lying in the extent to
which he afterwards broke away from their lead. Him M.
Picavet leaves here aside (except in the way of frequent
incidental reference), but only to reserve him for special
study in connexion with a newly recovered Institute-memoir
from the days of his Ideological enthusiasm.
A few pages of "Conclusion" (571-83, followed by some
inedita as appendix) are the less to be overlooked, because
here M. Picavet does what he can, in other way than by the
much-missed index, to bring together the multiplex threads
of his whole inquiry. In the last paragraphs of all, there is
a striking imagination of the state of mind of an Ideologist
transported from the beginning of the century, when he
worked so confidently for human enlightenment and pro-
gress, to the century's end with its vast increase of scientific
knowledge but also increasing sense of the limits set to
positive science and its ever-growing burden of social diffi-
culties and perils. The Ideologist, it is allowed, would have
to abate much of his practical optimism, and could no longer
deal so lightly as he did with philosophical questionings
because they had failed of decision. None the less he might
truly claim to have done a real stroke of work in his day.
He had broken ground in every one of the lines upon which
psychology has since advanced, — an effort only partially
recognised in the foregoing notice but admirably shown in
the book itself. He had also had his own measure of philo-
sophic insight when he proclaimed that all other human
search and all human striving should own the sway of a
science of " Ideas ".
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