The Scottish Philosophy [3]
mode of procedure recommended by Bacon. Descartes does indeed appeal to profound ideas, which may be regarded as mental facts; but it is not by them to arrive at laws by a gradual generalization; it is rather to employ them as foundation- stones of his structure, which is reared high above them by the joint dogmatic and deductive method, and on the geometric and not the inductive plan. It has been averred that Hobbes proceeded on the method of his friend Bacon; but Hobbes nowhere professes to do so: his doctrine of the origin of civil government is a mere theory, and his system of the human mind and of morals is obtained by a very defective analysis, and in fact, is mainly borrowed from Aristotle, whose profounder principles he was incapable of appreciating. It cannot be denied that Locke does proceed very largely in the way of observation; but it is a curious circumstance that he nowhere professes to follow the method of induction; and his great work may be summarily represented as an attempt to establish by internal facts the preconceived theory, that all our ideas are derived from sensation and reflection. To the Scottish school belongs the merit of being the first, avowedly and knowingly, to follow the inductive method, and to employ it systematically in psychological investigation. As the masters of the school were the first to adopt it, so they, and those who have borrowed from them, are almost the only persons who have studiously adhered to it. The school of Condillac in France, and its followers in England {4} and Germany, do indeed profess to attend to observation, but it is after the manner of the empiricists, described by Bacon as beginning with experience, but immediately abandoning it for premature hypotheses. It will be seen, as we advance, that Kant followed the critical and not the inductive method. Hutcheson and Turnbull, and especially Reid and Stewart, have the credit of announcing unambiguously, that the human mind is to be studied exclusively by the method of observation, and of consistently employing this mode of procedure in all their investigations.
II. It employs self-consciousness as the instrument of observation. It may thus be distinguished from some other schools with which it has been confounded. Bacon, we have seen, did believe in the applicability of his method to all the mental sciences. But he had no clear apprehension of the agency by which the observation is to be accomplished; he supposed it to be by " the history and tables concerning anger, fear, modesty, the memory, composition, division, judgment, and the like." In respect of the means of observation, philosophy is greatly indebted to Descartes, who taught men, in studying the human mind, to seize on great internal ideas. The questions started by Locke, and his mode of settling them, tend towards the same issue; he dwells fondly on reflection as the alone source of the ideas which we have of the workings of the human mind, and ever appeals to the internal sense as an arbiter in discussions as to the origin of ideas. But the Scottish philosophers took a step in advance of any of their predecessors, inasmuch as they professed to draw all the laws of mental philosophy -- indeed, their whole systems -- from the observations of consciousness.
By this feature they are at once distinguished from those who would construct a science of the human mind from the observation of the brain or nerves, or generally from animal physiology. Not indeed that the Scottish philosophy is required, by its manner or its principles, to reject the investigation of the functions of the bodily frame, as fitted to throw light on mental action. Certain of the masters of the school, such as Reid, Brown, and Hamilton, were well acquainted with physiology in its latest discoveries in their day, and carefully employed their knowledge to illustrate the operations of the human mind. {5} There is nothing in the method, or the spirit, or the cherished doctrines of the school tending to discountenance or disparage a painstaking experimental investigation
II. It employs self-consciousness as the instrument of observation. It may thus be distinguished from some other schools with which it has been confounded. Bacon, we have seen, did believe in the applicability of his method to all the mental sciences. But he had no clear apprehension of the agency by which the observation is to be accomplished; he supposed it to be by " the history and tables concerning anger, fear, modesty, the memory, composition, division, judgment, and the like." In respect of the means of observation, philosophy is greatly indebted to Descartes, who taught men, in studying the human mind, to seize on great internal ideas. The questions started by Locke, and his mode of settling them, tend towards the same issue; he dwells fondly on reflection as the alone source of the ideas which we have of the workings of the human mind, and ever appeals to the internal sense as an arbiter in discussions as to the origin of ideas. But the Scottish philosophers took a step in advance of any of their predecessors, inasmuch as they professed to draw all the laws of mental philosophy -- indeed, their whole systems -- from the observations of consciousness.
By this feature they are at once distinguished from those who would construct a science of the human mind from the observation of the brain or nerves, or generally from animal physiology. Not indeed that the Scottish philosophy is required, by its manner or its principles, to reject the investigation of the functions of the bodily frame, as fitted to throw light on mental action. Certain of the masters of the school, such as Reid, Brown, and Hamilton, were well acquainted with physiology in its latest discoveries in their day, and carefully employed their knowledge to illustrate the operations of the human mind. {5} There is nothing in the method, or the spirit, or the cherished doctrines of the school tending to discountenance or disparage a painstaking experimental investigation