is cutting away, or thinks he is cutting away, some diseased or abnormal part, he destroys the most essential structures.

We regard the discoveries of the anatomist and the physiologist as of great value to the psychologist. The mental philosophy which at the present day despises and ignores science marks itself as bigoted and absurd. The immense revolution which has taken place in the prevalent theories of sense-perception since the application of physical investigation to the solution of its problems is sufficient to vindicate a place for it in mental inquiries. But its proper place is a subordinate one. He who takes it as his sole or chief guide will fall into many errors. It is a general truth never to be ignored, that phenomena of one order can never be correctly interpreted by laws of an essentially different order. The physical inquirer, moreover, has this special disadvantage, that he can approach mental phenomena only from the outside. If our eyes could pierce everything, it would matter little at what point of view we took our station. But we have only a limited view; we walk in the world as between opaque walls. And when with the microscope and the scalpel we seek to study the. mind, we can reach only its dwelling or instruments, the nerves and brain. We may trace the course of afferent and efferent nerves, and time the vibrations as they pass along; we may learn the varied structure of sensitive centres; we may behold the cerebral lobes contract and expand; we may mark the effect upon their action of nutriment and exercise, lesion and disease, but still we are far from having entered at all the arcana of the mind. Even if, by some new optical instrument, we could gaze into the very centre of the brain, and instead of the inductions and probabilities, which are all that we now possess, we could behold every minutest part and the phases of its daily history, the passage of every nerve current and the spinning of every molecule, we should still be on the outside of the mind, we should still have, not sensation but motion, not mind but matter. None of these physical facts are mental processes. They do not constitute them. They cannot be found in them by analysis. There is no evidence sufficient to show that they even produce them. They are but their usual concomitants or conditions. The

physical antecedents might all be supposed to exist and act without the occurrence of a single conscious experience. The material and the mental events usually, indeed, stand in relation; but there is nothing in this usual relation that involves its necessity, still less the identity or equivalence of the two orders of events.

Now, if this chasm which always separates the physical from the mental, and allows physiological observation only a view of the soul's dress or tool-box,-never of the soul itself,- be borne in mind, much profit may be derived from such studies. But the tendency always is towards forgetting, or towards a bold push, such as M. Taine has made, to bridge the gulf. The higher ideas and faculties of the soul are traced down into the lower; ideas into images, images into sensations. Able to perceive from the outside only the succession of events or their relation to their physical conditions, they are naturally led to regard these as constituting their whole character. The bond of personal unity will next be united by some analytical legerdemain, and the mind left a surface series unsupported by anything. The pillars of substance, force, extension, etc., are next taken from under bodies, and the material world becomes a realm of shadowy oscillations performed and originated and taking place in nothing. Having thoroughly disorganized both the realm of matter and of mind, and having made the reader's brain dizzy with contemplation of the universal motion which is all that is left of the solid globe, it is not difficult to slip him over the chasm before he perceives it, and persuade him that a motion and a sensation, an idea and a molecule, are only two faces of one and the same thing. Henceforth all is smooth sailing, inasmuch as the whole of psychology becomes now properly what Auguste Comte called it in his "Positive Philosophy," "a simple subdivision of animal physiology."

If the one step, the identifying of motion with sensation, be legitimate, all the rest is sufficiently so. But if that step cannot properly be taken, the chasm remains, the whole process must be condemned. And we must say that M. Taine has failed in this one essential step. The only proofs that he offers are the analogy of the difference of sensations according to

the route that they enter the mind, and the existence of unconscious, rudimentary sensations which he had before essayed to establish. The latter we have already shown the illogicalness of; the former merely suggests, but proves nothing. The words "mental" and "physical" mark the widest distinction known to us in nature. Phenomena of the one order are entirely unlike phenomena of the other.

Though constantly related in all human beings, they stand as constantly in sharp antithesis, as well in their simplest as in their most complex forms, at their nearest points of contact as at their most remote divergences. "Between the idea of a motion and the idea of a sensation," says Tyndall, “there is nothing in common." "No exertion of thought," says Herbert Spencer, "can enable us to conceive either of these ultimate elements as convertible the one into the other." But if, as Taine tells us, thought is but vibration seen from within instead of from without, why does it thus vigorously repudiate any identity with its other side?

The fact is, that we cannot study the mind successfully unless we take consciousness as our chief instrument. That alone gives us the inside view, the immediate vision. In its crude, unrefined form, as the ignorant, unreflecting mind apprehends it, its testimony may perhaps mislead. It may need to be sifted. It may need to be tested, assisted, magnified, as Taine says; but when its strict and pure deliverances are ascertained, we can never have too much of them; we can find no source of information which can give us a more direct and more intimate knowledge of the mind. If consciousness needs the assistance and connection of physiology to attain a true knowledge of the mind, still more does the physiologist need the help of consciousness, and a firm trust in it. To find the very problems to be explained or the simpler mental elements which he would resolve them into, he must resort to the interspection of consciousness. No unconscious action or connection of actions can, of themselves, tell us anything of the conscious states of the soul. A true philosophy must not only start with consciousness, but will consult her at every turn; and whenever it finds itself offending her deepest instincts, it will know that somehow it has missed the right path.

JAMES T. BIXBY.

ART. VI. The Service of the Poor. By CAROLINE EMELIA STEPHEN. London and New York: McMillan & Co. 1871.

THE title alone of this remarkable book does not give a correct impression of its contents. The title-page further announces it to be "An Inquiry into the Reasons for and against the Establishment of Religious Sisterhoods for Charitable Purposes." This amplification reveals the real task which the authoress has set herself, namely, a very close examination of the respective merits of religious and secular establishments for ministering to the sick, in the course of which she gives a history of the principal charitable sisterhoods on the Continent of Europe and their work, comparing the results with the experiment of a nurses' training-school, which is her example of the secular system. To find the most efficient method of relief for the poorer classes is a problem which has had so large a share of public attention of late years that an able book upon any subdivision of that subject is a valuable acquisition; and Miss Stephen has given the various modes of charitable succor of the sick thorough investigation, and weighed them with admirable clearness and judgment. But it is in its bearing on the more exciting topic of religious retreats for women that we think her work of most importance and interest. So much enthusiasm, romance, party spirit, personal feeling, and other emotions, both of a higher and lower nature, invest the question of sisterhoods, that great confusion has ensued as to the outward frame-work and inward spirit of such societies, while a sort of agitated interest in them is constantly increasing. In this country, where the interest is wider spread and more feverish in proportion to our ignorance of the nature and results of such communities in places where they have had time to take root and bear fruit, mere statistical knowledge alone would be of immense use, and a careful, comprehensive, impartial consideration of the subject of invaluable benefit to a very large class among us. Miss Stephen has, therefore, done a great service to the Christian, the civilized world, and peculiarly to our portion of it, in giving us what she calls "a fuller knowledge of the facts of the case," and a keen, profound, dispassionate too dispassionate inquiry into its

moral phenomena. Moreover, as a contribution to general literature the book deserves a very high place; it is a solid octavo volume of three hundred and fifty pages, whose accuracy of information, laborious collection of materials, judiciously condensed, earnest thought, sustained argument, vigorous, lucid, and agreeable style, make it, in all respects, a capital perform

ance.

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Miss Stephen begins her Preface by the incontestable position that some kind of organization is necessary for providing a supply of trained women for works of charity, and for directing them when trained in the performance of such works.” She distinguishes between the two bases of such organization as religious and secular, using the terms as representing respectively systems whose purpose is primarily the spiritual benefit of the performer or recipient of these works, and those whose ultimate object is charity. The first demands allegiance to some religious denomination as indispensable to membership of the association, and exacts the gratuitous service of all its members; such an association is called a "sisterhood." The other necessarily involves no such conditions. "Works of charity may be roughly divided into the three branches of teaching, nursing, and almsgiving." The first and last are dismissed, the former as a settled question, settled in favor of secular institutions, the latter as so unsettled that it is impossible to consider it in its present state; therefore, the only one to be examined is nursing. Miss Stephen illustrates her idea by reference to five sisterhoods, ancient and modern, Roman Catholic and Protestant, with an account of the Liverpool training-school for nurses, as an example of a purely secular establishment. This forms the first part of the book.

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The first instance of a religious and charitable association among women is the female diaconate of the primitive church. Very little is known about them; they seem to have been the object of constant opposition from their first appearance, and to have exhibited very early some of the most marked features of monastic institutions, namely, perpetual vows, celibacy, addiction to penance and mortification, and reversion of the members' property to the religious establishment to which they were attached. They were suppressed in the Western