The Scottish Philosophy [198]
but is possessed of social and benevolent affections. His lectures on the emotions are radiant all over with poetry, and will repay a careful reading much better than many of the scholastic discussions or anatomical descriptions which are furnished in some of the chairs of mental science.
(9) It would be injustice not to add that he has some very splendid illustrations of natural theism, fitted at once to refine and elevate the soul. I have never heard of any youth being inclined towards scepticism or pantheism, or becoming prejudiced against Christian truth, in consequence of attending or reading the lectures of Brown. In note E, appended to his work on " Cause and Effect, " he has a powerful argument in favor of the possibility of a miracle, showing that it is not inconsistent with the intuitive law of cause and effect. " There is no violation of a law of nature, but there is a new consequent of a new antecedent."
Over against these excellencies I have to place certain grave deficiencies and errors.
(1) I take exception to the account which he gives of the very object and end of mental science. According to him, it is to analyze the complex into the simple, and discover the laws of the succession of our mental states. There is a great {333} and obvious oversight here. The grand business of the science of the human mind is to observe the nature of our mental states, with the view of co-ordinating them and rising to the discovery of the laws which they obey and the faculties from which they proceed. Taking this view, analysis becomes a subordinate though of course an important instrument; and we have to seek to discover the faculties which determine the nature of the states as well as the laws of their succession.
(2) In his analysis he often misses the main element of the concrete or complex phenomena. In referring ideas to sensation he neglects to consider how much is involved in body occupying space, and how much in body exercising property; and the account of memory he fails to discover how much is implied in recognizing the event remembered as having happened in time past,-that is, he omits the idea of time. Often, too, when he has accomplished an analysis of a complex state, does he forget the elements, and reminds us of the boy who imagines that be has annihilated a piece of paper when he has burnt it, forgetting that the elements are to be found in the smoke and in the ashes. It is by a most deceitful decomposition -- it is by missing the very of the phenomena -- that he is able to derive all our intellectual ideas from sensation and simple and relative suggestion.
(3) He grants that there are intuitive principles of belief in the mind; but he has never so much as attempted an induction of them, or an exposition of their nature and of the laws which regulate them, or a classification of them. In this respect he must be regarded as falling behind his predecessors in the school, and behind Hamilton, who succeeded him in the estimation of students of mental science. The intelligent reader is greatly disappointed to find him, after he has shown so forcibly that there is an intuition involved in our belief in personal identity and in causation, immediately dropping these intuitions and inquiring no more into their nature. He takes great credit for reducing the faculties and principles enumerated by Reid to a much smaller number; but if we gather up all the elements which he is obliged to bring in, we shall find the list to be as large as that of Reid or Stewart. {334}
(4) Thus he represents consciousness as merely a general term for all the states and affections of mind; and then, in order to account for our belief in the sameness of self, he is obliged to call in a special instinct. " We believe our identity, as one mind, in our feelings of to-day and our feelings of yesterday, as indubitably as we believe that the fire which burned yesterday would in the same circumstances burn us to-day, not from reasoning, but from a principle of instinct and irresistible
(9) It would be injustice not to add that he has some very splendid illustrations of natural theism, fitted at once to refine and elevate the soul. I have never heard of any youth being inclined towards scepticism or pantheism, or becoming prejudiced against Christian truth, in consequence of attending or reading the lectures of Brown. In note E, appended to his work on " Cause and Effect, " he has a powerful argument in favor of the possibility of a miracle, showing that it is not inconsistent with the intuitive law of cause and effect. " There is no violation of a law of nature, but there is a new consequent of a new antecedent."
Over against these excellencies I have to place certain grave deficiencies and errors.
(1) I take exception to the account which he gives of the very object and end of mental science. According to him, it is to analyze the complex into the simple, and discover the laws of the succession of our mental states. There is a great {333} and obvious oversight here. The grand business of the science of the human mind is to observe the nature of our mental states, with the view of co-ordinating them and rising to the discovery of the laws which they obey and the faculties from which they proceed. Taking this view, analysis becomes a subordinate though of course an important instrument; and we have to seek to discover the faculties which determine the nature of the states as well as the laws of their succession.
(2) In his analysis he often misses the main element of the concrete or complex phenomena. In referring ideas to sensation he neglects to consider how much is involved in body occupying space, and how much in body exercising property; and the account of memory he fails to discover how much is implied in recognizing the event remembered as having happened in time past,-that is, he omits the idea of time. Often, too, when he has accomplished an analysis of a complex state, does he forget the elements, and reminds us of the boy who imagines that be has annihilated a piece of paper when he has burnt it, forgetting that the elements are to be found in the smoke and in the ashes. It is by a most deceitful decomposition -- it is by missing the very
(3) He grants that there are intuitive principles of belief in the mind; but he has never so much as attempted an induction of them, or an exposition of their nature and of the laws which regulate them, or a classification of them. In this respect he must be regarded as falling behind his predecessors in the school, and behind Hamilton, who succeeded him in the estimation of students of mental science. The intelligent reader is greatly disappointed to find him, after he has shown so forcibly that there is an intuition involved in our belief in personal identity and in causation, immediately dropping these intuitions and inquiring no more into their nature. He takes great credit for reducing the faculties and principles enumerated by Reid to a much smaller number; but if we gather up all the elements which he is obliged to bring in, we shall find the list to be as large as that of Reid or Stewart. {334}
(4) Thus he represents consciousness as merely a general term for all the states and affections of mind; and then, in order to account for our belief in the sameness of self, he is obliged to call in a special instinct. " We believe our identity, as one mind, in our feelings of to-day and our feelings of yesterday, as indubitably as we believe that the fire which burned yesterday would in the same circumstances burn us to-day, not from reasoning, but from a principle of instinct and irresistible