He begins by recommending the study, gives the definitions, unfolds the divisions, explains the terms with amazing erudition and unsurpassed logical precision, and dwells largely on consciousness, its laws and conditions.The reading of this volume will prove as bracing to the mind as a run up a hill of a morning on a botanical or geological excursion is to the body.We especially recommend the study of it to those whose pursuits are usually of a different character, as, for example, to those who are dissipating their minds by light literature, or whose attention has been directed exclusively to physical facts, and who have thus been cultivating one set of the faculties which God has given them, to the neglect of others, and have thus been putting their mental frame out of proper shape and proportion, -- as the fisher, by strengthening his chest and arms in rowing, leaves his lower extremities thin and slender.There is a fine healthy tone about his defence of the liberal as against the more lucrative sciences, which latter Schelling called <Brodwissenchaften>, {430} which Hamilton wittily translates, <the bread and butter sciences>.He quotes with approbation the well-known sentiment of Lessing, " Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left <Search after Truth>, deign to tender me the one I might prefer,-in all humility, but without hesitation, I would request Search after Truth."But we should concur in such statements as these only with two important explanations or qualifications; the one is, that the search be after truth, which we must value when we find it; and the other is, that it be after attainable and useful truth.It has been the great error and sin of speculative philosophy that it has been expending its strength in building in one age ingenious theories which the next age takes down.I maintain that such activity wastes the energy without increasing the strength.He who thus fights is like one beating the air, and his exertion ends, not in satisfaction, but in weariness and restlessness.The admirable test of Bacon here comes in to restrain all such useless speculation, viz., that we are to try them by their fruits.Had this been the proper place we could have shown that Bacon's doctrine on this subject has often been misunderstood.He does not say that science is to be valued for its fruits, but it is to be tested by its fruits; just as faith, which, however, is of value in itself, is to be tried by the good works to which it leads.Thus limited and thus understood, there is profound wisdom in the caution of Bacon, which will not discourage an inductive inquiry into the human mind, its laws and fundamental principles, but will lay a restraint on the profitless metaphysical theories which have run to seed prematurely in Germany, where thinkers are sick of them, and are now being blown into our country and scattered over it like the down of thistles.
This volume is full of brief and sententious maxims.
Take the following as examples: --
"It is ever the contest that pleases us, and not the victory.Thus it is in play; thus it is in bunting;thus it is in the search after truth; thus it is in life.The past does not interest, the present does not satisfy, the future alone is the object which engages us." "What man holds of matter does not make up his personality.They are his, not be; man is not an organism, -- he is an intelligence served by organs.""I do not mean to assert that all materialists deny or actually disbelieve a God.For in very many cases this would be at once an unmerited compliment to their reasoning, {431} and an unmerited reproach to their faith." "Wonder has been contemptuously called the daughter of ignorance; true, but wonder we should add is the mother of knowledge" "Woe to the revolutionist who is not him self a creature of the revolution ! If he anticipate he is lost, for it requires what no individual can supply, a long and powerful counter-sympathy in a nation to untwine the ties of custom which bind a people to the established and the old."The following is his tabular view of the distribution of philosophy:-Mind or Consciousness Facts -- Phaenomenology, Empirical Psychology Cognitions, Feelings Conative Powers (Will and Desire)Laws -- Nomology, Rational Psychology Cognitions -- Logic Feelings -- Aesthetic Conative Powers Moral Philosophy Political Philosophy Results -- Ontology, Inferential Psychology Being of God Immortality of the Soul, &c.
I set little value on this division.The same topics would require to be discussed under more than one head.In his lectures Sir William has taken up only one of the three grand general groups, viz., Empirical Psychology, and even this he has discussed only in part.A portion of the second group is treated of in his lectures on logic.On the others he never entered.
It will be seen from the above table that he followed Kant in giving a threefold distribution of the mental faculties into the Cognitive, the Emotive, and the Conative.
This is an improvement on the old division by Aristotle into the cognitive and motive, or of that of the schoolmen into the understanding and the will.Still it is not complete and exhaustive.He is obliged to include the imagination in the first head, and yet it can scarcely be called a cognitive power, though, of course, it implies a previous cognition.
The conscience comes in under the conative powers; but, in fact, the conscience partakes of the nature both of a cognitive and conative power.It is one of the defects of the arrangement that it does not allot a clearly separate place to the conscience.
The following is his division of the cognitive powers:
--
1.Presentative External -- Perception.
Internal -- Self-Consciousness 2.Conservative Memory 3.Reproductive Without Will -- Suggestion With Will -- Reminiscence 4.Representative Imagination 5.Elaborative Comparison -- Faculty of Relation 6.Regulative Reason -- Common sense {432}
