NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

NOTE A.-LETTER III.

THE following extracts on the subject of this Letter, and in support of its general views, will probably be welcome to the inquirer who wishes to see important questions exhibited in the peculiar lights of various minds, especially as some of the passages are from writings perhaps not readily accessible. The author scarcely needs to add that, in presenting them to his readers, he by no means adopts every opinion or every expression which they contain. The first is from a writer now seldom referred to:

"According to this manner of considering power, it is absolutely contradictory to maintain the unity of the mind, and yet to suppose the existence of distinct intellectual faculties or powers. If the primary cause in one series be different from the primary cause in another, we cannot refer both these series to the same principle. If we trace an action to the will, a recollection to the memory, or a judgment to the understanding, how shall we pretend that there is yet a more remote principle? By what inference shall we conclude that the power of imagination is derived from anything else; or that the faculty of comprehension is the delegate of any superior intelligence? All these separate powers are primary causes; at least,

they are so to our understandings, if we can trace only to them any series of causes and effects. To say, then, that power is a primary, or creative, cause, is to admit that it is a principle, and in admitting it to be a principle, we must conclude against the unity of the human soul, while we continue to insist upon the existence of distinct mental powers."- Academical Questions, by Sir Wm. Drummond, p. 6.

The next extract is from a work of the celebrated Broussais, translated from the French, and published in the United States, by a gentleman who emigrated a long time ago from this country, where he is still remembered as the author of an able volume of Ethical and Political Tracts:

"What we call attention, perception of external objects, perception of our own thought or consciousness, idea, judgment, reasoning, memory, are not specific faculties, separate entities inhabiting the brain, put into action by the impressions that proceed from the senses, or by some pretended internal force independent of them, as has been asserted of le moi, or of consciousness, and of the memory; they are no other than varieties of cerebral perception, which we may observe as facts or phenomena, but which we cannot venture to explain. Still less are we permitted to adopt the poetry of metaphysics, and to personify these varieties or modifications, for the purpose of explaining the superiority of one over the rest, or the influence they exercise one over another, as active principles; for we cannot do this without treating these phenomena as if they were bodies cognizable by the senses, with which, in fact, they have nothing to do, for they can resemble nothing but themselves."-On Irritation and Insanity, by F. J. V. Broussais, translated by Thomas Cooper, M.D., President of the South Carolina College, p. 133.

The views of Dr. Thomas Brown on this subject are well known, but the following short extract is too much to the purpose to be withheld:

"Still less, I trust, is it necessary to repeat the warning, already so often repeated, that you are not to conceive that any classification of the states or affections of the mind, as referable to certain powers or susceptibilities, makes these powers anything different or separate from the mind itself, as originally and essentially susceptible of the various modifications of which these powers are only a shorter name. And yet what innumerable controversies in philosophy have arisen, and are still frequently arising, from this very mistake, strange and absurd as the mistake may seem. No sooner, for example, were certain affections of the mind classed together as belonging to the will, and certain others as belonging to the understanding that is to say, no sooner was the mind, existing in certain states denominated the understanding, and in certain other states denominated the will, than the understanding and the will ceased to be considered the same. individual substance, and became immediately, as it were, two opposite and contending powers in the empire of mind, as distinct as any two sovereigns with their separate nations under their control; and it became an object of as fierce contention to determine whether certain affections of the mind belonged to the understanding or to the will, as, in the management of political affairs, to determine whether a disputed province belonged to one potentate or to another. Every new diversity of the faculties of the mind, indeed, converted each faculty into a little independent mind; as if the original mind were like that wonderful animal, of which naturalists tell us, that may be cut into an almost infinite number of parts, each of which becomes a polypus as perfect as that from which it was separated. The only difference is, that those who

make us acquainted with this wonderful property of the polypus, acknowledge the divisibility of the parent animal, while those who assert the spiritual multiplicity are at the same time assertors of the absolute indivisibility of that which they divide."-Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, by Thomas Brown, M.D., vol. i., p. 365.

The three extracts which follow are from a writer manifestly more remarkable for acuteness than courtesy. They are, however, worth the attentive consideration of the student:

"Their other instrument of proof is, also, an abuse of language; and a very copious source of error and delusion. They personify an abstract term, and then ascribe to it, literally, the qualities of an agent. This is in the way of the rhetorical Sir James. It is more surprising that Butler should have been deluded by so poor a fallacy.

"Our appetites, say they, have their objects, each its own, at which it aims as its end; our appetite of food, for example; our appetite of drink; the sexual appetite; and so of other propensities. None of these has the augmentation of the sum of our enjoyments as its object. "Is it not miserable to build a philosophical doctrine upon such a juggle of words? a juggle of words? Would not a moderate portion of reflection have sufficed to tell these men, that appetite is merely a name; that nothing really desires, or appetizes (to make a cognate word); nothing has an object or an end; nothing aims, but a man. And when a man aims at an object, and that a selfish one, is it not trifling to tell us, that it is his appetite which aims, and not he; therefore, he is disinterested?"-A Fragment on Mackintosh, p. 72. This

might

be quibbled on Thysiological grounds.

"The next of Butler's two truths, panegyrized by Sir James, is, that conscience has a controlling power over man's other propensities.

"There is here the same mystery of personification as we have had to deal with in regard to the appetites.

"What a man's conscience is said to do, the man does; when the man's conscience is said to control, the man controls. But how ridiculous would any person be held who should go about to tell us in lofty phrase that a man has a right to control himself?

"If it be replied, that the man ought to govern himself in a certain way, we grant it. Nobody denies it, or ever did. But we ask, why ought he? That question has long been asked. And surely it is no answer to tell us that conscience has a right to direct the way; for that only 11 brings us round to the same point, that the man has a right to direct the way."-A Fragment on Mackintosh, p. 74.

"It is for the benefit of exemplifying strongly to the young the tendency of vague and circuitous language in philosophy, that there is any use in attending to Sir James. For that reason, we notice the two sentences which he gives us next. "Conscience may forbid the will to contribute to the gratification of a desire. No desire ever forbids will to obey conscience.' All this personification of certain mental phenomena; one phenomenon forbidding another phenomenon; one phenomenon contributing to the gratification of another phenomenon ; a certain phenomenon never forbidding a certain phenomenon to obey a third phenomenon; is, in itself, rank nonsense. And when you apply to it the only rational meaning of which it is susceptible, it is a trite, or rather nugatory observation; neither more nor less than this, that it is sometimes immoral to obey a desire; but it is never immoral to obey conscience in opposition to a desire; which seems to come to this, that it is moral to act morally, immoral to act immorally. And this is the sum and substance of Sir James's theory.'"-A Fragment on Mackintosh, p. 118.

Sir G. C. Haughton, the author of the work from