line which shall fix the natural limits set by God to our knowledge; and we are not of that desponding, or rather indolent class, who distrust the powers of the human mind to do, in all cases, one or the other of these.

So far as our present subject is concerned, it may aid us in doing this if we inquire for a little how it has happened that physical science, and especially astronomy, has so far outstripped moral science. What are the causes of a result so impossible to have been anticipated?

And first, we may mention a difficulty much insisted on by Chalmers, as pertaining to the observation of all mental phenomena. This arises from the fact that the mind is both the observer and the thing observed, and that some of its states at least (they say all) are of such a character as to preclude examination at the moment they exist. Thus, when a man is thoroughly angry his whole thought is directed to the object of his anger, and nothing can be conceived more incompatible with the state of an angry man than that he should be engaged in taking psychological observations on himself. The moment he turns his attention from the object of his anger to himself for the purpose of observing it, the anger is gone. It cannot, therefore, be studied directly, as we study the objects of our senses, but only as it is remembered.

This holds in all cases of violent emotion and should have its just weight, but not in the ordinary states of thought and feeling. If the view of Chalmers and of Brown before him were adopted in its strictness, no man would ever know his own present state, but only the states he had been in, and so could never deal with his present, but only with his past self. The moment his attention should be so far called to himself as to inquire whether he was angry, his anger must cease; and the

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prophet of old who thought he was angry, and said he did. well to be, was mistaken. In thinking, we know not only the object of our thought, but ourselves as thinking. The consciousness is so far complex as to embrace both. So in the feelings. There is no more difficulty in supposing such a complexity of the consciousness as to embrace both an act and a feeling caused by an act, than there is in supposing that the same consciousness can embrace the remembrance of an act and the feeling caused by that remembrance.

There is doubtless at this point a real difficulty, but we think it less formidable than it is made by Chalmers and others.

To a successful investigation the first requisite is a clear apprehension of the subject to be investigated as distinguished from everything with which it may be confounded, or to which it is related. This discrimination in regard to morals has often failed to be made. This is the second

reason.

Language accommodates itself, after a time, to the exigencies of thought; and when clear discriminations are generally or persistently made, there will be terms to express them. In the Latin language, the word for conscience and for consciousness was the same; it is so still in the French, Italian, and Spanish, and this was formerly true of the English. But if the moral consciousness were not now partitioned off, and its phenomena grouped by a word of its own, we may easily see how difficult it would be to disentangle those phenomena from the mass of other things covered by the same word; and while the language remained in that state it was scarcely possible that much progress should be made in the science. But as thought was concentrated and analysis progressed, that which was

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consciousness par eminence, the moral consciousness, appropriated the term conscience; and yet no one can now read even the scientific writers on the subject and not perceive that they still use the term with a wide diversity of signification.

It was this state of the language, or more properly of the public mind represented by it, that rendered possible in the Scotch universities such a state of things as is complained of by Chalmers. He says: "In the hands of some of our most celebrated professors, it" (i. e. moral philosophy) has been made to usurp the whole domain of humanity, insomuch that every emotion which the heart can feel, and every deed which the hand can perform, have, in every one aspect, whether relating to moral character or not, come under the cognizance of moral philosophy." He calls the science as there treated " a strange concretion," "a vast and varied miscellany," which he wished "to marshal aright into proper and distinct groups."

How this subject has been regarded in England we may learn from an introductory lecture to a course on Moral Philosophy delivered in London by Sidney Smith. "Moral philosophy," he says, "properly speaking, is contrasted to natural philosophy; comprehending everything spiritual, as that comprehends everything corporeal, and constituting the most difficult and the most sublime of those two divisions under which all human knowledge must be arranged." "In this sense," he proceeds, "Moral Philosophy is used by Berkley, by Hartley, by Hutcheson, by Adam Smith, by Howe, by Reid, and by Stewart. In this sense it is taught in the Scotch universities, where alone it is taught in this island; and in this sense it comprehends all the intellectual, active and moral faculties of man; the laws by which they are governed; the

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limits by which they are controlled, and the means by which they may be improved." In accordance with this, we find in his course, lectures on external perception, on taste, and on wit and humor, while in his whole twentyseven lectures he did not treat of the conscience, or of right and wrong, at all.

Such a blending of departments, all covered by one name, in a single professorship, could not be favorable to accurate analysis. There were reasons for it. Mental and moral science are nearly related; but all knowledge is related to all other knowledge at some points, and it would be scarcely more incongruous to assign geography to the astronomer because the earth is one of the planets, than to group external perception and the knowledge of duty under the same science because they both belong to the mind.

A third cause of the slower progress of moral science is its greater complexity.

All science supposes uniformity in the phenomena, and so, in their cause or law, which is what science seeks. If there be no cause acting uniformly, and tending to entire uniformity of results, there is no basis for science. But with such a cause, the complexity will be in proportion to the number of disturbing forces that may come in between it and the phenomena as seen by us. In astronomy these disturbing causes are comparatively few. Gravitation towards the sun only, would cause the planets to move in a perfect ellipse. But none of them do thus move, and it is obvious that disturbing forces might be multiplied so as to render a science of the stars, or at least any other than a hypothetical one, impossible. Here lies the obstacle to a science of the winds. There is doubtless uniformity of causation, but the phenomena, as known to us, are so

modified that we cannot trace each one back to its cause, or predict the future. So of human conduct. Men are themselves unlike, and in endless variety. Motives are complex. The effects of education, of social position, of political institutions and of climate, are to be estimated; and even though all the actions of men might be referred to one principle, it would be impossible to trace them to it, or to predict with certainty the course of any one individual under its guidance.

When we look, then, at this greater complexity, and remember that the study of processes within us, mental and moral, is connected with no such pleasure as observation by the senses, and can have no such aid from others, we find a reason of no little weight for the slower progress of this science.

A fourth reason is to be found in the fact, which we should not have anticipated, that the nearer we come to that in our being which is most intimate and central, which is our very self, the more difficult observation and analysis become.

As early, certainly, as the time of Cicero, the mind was compared to the eye, because that sees other things but not itself. The power of making itself an object to itself belongs to the mind of man as he is distinguished from the brutes; it is the last power that is developed, and in most men is scarcely developed at all. But where this power is developed it begins with those phenomena which are most outward and least essential. Hence, not only in matter, but in mind, completed science will probably travel from that which is more remote, or more outward, to that which is nearer, or more inward.

It is now generally conceded that there are two kinds of knowledge, or cognitions, one which we gain of,