"

distinguished by specially-related attributes. The instinctive proceedings of the insect, equally with those which in higher creatures we call intelligent, we are unable even to express without referring to things around." But just the same might be said of vegetable movement, e. g., Venus's fly-trap, nay, even a single act of a planet as it moves about in its orbit, cannot be explained "without taking into account its relations to neighbouring objects." Thus, even if we exclude such instances as the last and only include vegetable movements (which are certainly related to "neighbouring objects distinguished by specially-related attributes"), psychology is made so wide that it becomes synonymous with biology, i. e. a science of life. Biology should indeed properly have under it as one subordinate branch, psychology, the science of the three kinds of soul, vegetable, animal, and rational. In one sense this would make it synonymous with physiology, but physiology regards primarily the functions, not the kinds of soul, i. e. the functions as they run through the three souls, e. g. nutrition in plants, animals and cooking man. Therefore psychology and physiology relate to cross-divisions of the same subject-matter. Mr. Herbert Spencer really means by psychology a science of mind subjectively considered together with an objective science of those animal activities which most seem to resemble our mental activities. Thus psychology is a science (built up from and on a subjective basis sui generis) of the activities of rational and sentient souls in so far as rational and sentient or sentient only.

It is a pity Mr. Spencer did not give this explanation earlier. Here he fully admits that psychology (subjective) is altogether sui generis, and (p. 141) "that objective psychology can have no existence as such, without borrowing its data from subjective psychology." Certainly then he should have begun with the subjective, in its most complete and developed condition, and proceeded thence to the objective, to physiology of all kinds, vegetable as well as animal, and finally concluded with the combined teaching of all.

The contents of this first part of Mr. Spencer's work may be summarized as follows:

Quantity and complexity of self-motion in animals vary with the mass and complexity of their nervous system (consisting of white conducting and grey explosive parts), which requires integrity, nutrition, and warmth for its due action in pulsating, intermittent nerve-reverberations. Feelings run parallel to and follow the laws of nervous action, and psychology is, in fact, a branch of biology.

The whole teaching of this part may, perhaps, be condensed into the following phrase:-" Motion and feelings are parallelly correlated with nervous structure."

To the teaching of this first part there is, on the whole, comparatively little to object. Nevertheless there are, as we have seen, some errors and inaccuracies of detail and some very important "beggings" of the main question as to the distinction between thought and feeling. Together with these defects there are also certain failures of analysis, resulting in a confusion of thought and a mode of treatment tending, by implication, to prejudice readers who are not on their guard, against truths which are not directly attacked or even explicitly referred to.

PART II.

The second part of Mr. Spencer's work is entitled THE INDUCTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY.

This is a much more important part, and is an account of feelings from a subjective stand-point. The mind is represented as known only in states (each ultimately compound though seemingly simple), formed of feelings and relations (themselves feelings) between feelings segregated to their like in classes and subclasses, according as they are simultaneous or successive, like or unlike. A real objective cause, it is affirmed, is implied and must be assumed, but neither feelings nor relations are really equivalent to such objective nexus which is unknowable. Feelings and relations are said to be revivable and associable in the degree in which they are relational, and according to the conditions under which they are experienced. Pleasures and pains are represented as due to natural selection, which has evolved them in races which have been preserved by its action.

CHAPTER I.-THE SUBSTANCE OF MIND.

The sections of this chapter are as follows:-§ 58. The mind is only knowable as qualitatively differentiated, i. e., in its states. $59. This is a truth necessarily conceded by both realists and idealists because unclassable by both. § 60. States of mind apparently (e. g. musical sound) are really compound, and all states are in fact various agglutinations of primitive nervous shocks. § 61. There is a parallelism with this as to matter, which probably consists of one unit variously compounded-all changes being, fundamentally, allotropism. 62. Neither can the subjective be reduced to the objective, nor vice versa. § 63. Nevertheless, of the two, external force is rather to be translated into terms of mind than the reverse, but both are inexplicable save by some unknowable existence underlying both.

This chapter is at once so important, and so bristles with errors and confusions, that they almost demand a small volume for their adequate exposition. Mr. Spencer says (p. 146), "if we take as

the substance of mind, mind as qualitatively differentiated in cach portion that is separable by introspection," then "assuming an underlying something," we may know something of it. But we may well ask, on what ground shall we make this assumption? Unless he grants a self-consciousness which he does not grant, such an assumption will be both groundless and unverifiable. He goes on to say if we take the "underlying something" to be the "substance of mind," then "no amount of what we call intelligence, however transcendent, can grasp such knowledge." He afterwards (as we shall see) proceeds to show that we cannot know it in the way we know other things; but surely our knowledge of self (since there is only one self) may well be a peculiar kind of knowledge. Knowledge is one thing, the way in which we know anything is another. By the argument here used it might be proved, not only that mind is not known but does not exist, since all is knowable that we have any right to call existence. Therefore, since, according to Mr. Spencer, mind is unknowable, we have no right to say it exists; and, by the way, the same argument may be used against his "unknowable" also. Yet if there is one prominent feature of Mr. Spencer's teaching, it is the supreme certainty born in us of the existence of what he calls the "unknowable." But Mr. Spencer, in fact, admits that we do know mind as a persisting something in contrast with transient modifications, i. e., as a substance. He does so when he says (p. 146):-"While each particular impression or idea can be absent, that which holds impressions and ideas together is never absent; and its unceasing presence necessitates, or indeed constitutes, the notion of continuous existence or reality. Existence means nothing more than persistence; and hence in mind, that which persists in spite of all changes and maintains the unity of the aggregate in defiance of all attempts to divide it, is that of which existence in the full sense of the word must be predicated, that which we must postulate as the substance of mind in contradistinction to the varying forms it assumes." Yet he none the less tells us that the substance of mind cannot possibly be known, because since " every state of mind is some modification of this substance of mind"-in no state of mind can the substance of mind be present unmodified. But this does not prove that the substance of mind is unknowable, but only that it is not knowable except in its modifications. Again, he denies the possibility of such knowledge because of the necessary conditions, according to him, of knowledge.

*

* This may be questioned as, not to speak of "potentiality," surely it is conceivable that existence may have no more duration than a point has extension.

He may however be met in limine thus. There cannot be a consciousness of difference without a comparison, and two things cannot be compared if one is unknown and unknowable. But Mr. Spencer talks of states of mind known as "states of mind," or "modifications of mind." Yet they can only be known as such by comparison with a "persistent substance" of mind, and therefore this must be known in order that we may know "states of mind" as "states of mind."

In

Now, concerning his argument, he remarks by the way (p. 147), "as in the absence of change there is no consciousness, there can be no knowledge." But how does Mr. Spencer know that? I dispute. it, and even if true for us, the expression is too absolute, since in other conditions than those known to us conscious knowledge may endure permanently without change. But he continues his argument to the effect that knowledge can only be the establishment in thought of determinate relations, and that which contemplates is distinct from that which is contemplated, and that which, in knowing, is affected by the thing known, must be substance of mind, and therefore the thing known cannot be the substance of mind also, otherwise "we should have the substance of mind known in a state of mind, which is a contradiction. brief, a thing cannot at the same instant be both the subject and the object of thought; and yet the substance of mind must be this before it can be known." But I deny that there is any necessary contradiction in the substance of mind being made intelligible to us, not as but by states of mind; its substance (which can never be felt but only perceived, as that which acts) may be made intelligible to us by means of its very acts, i. e., by means of states of mind. Again, why may it not be the exclusive property of mind to be both subject and object simultaneously? Yet even this is not necessary, if the mind is object and subject in successive instants, that alone may suffice to give it knowledge of itself, its nature, its substance, and its states. Indeed the knowledge of the objectivity or the subjectivity of any objective or subjective entity, positively requires the existence of such a synthesis of subject and object as Mr. Spencer denies the possibility of. It positively requires it, because no objective entity can be known as objective without contrasting it with the subject, and similarly you cannot know any subjective entity as subjective without contrasting it with an object, and in each case the subject must be made temporarily objective to obtain the comparison and contrast. But if Mr. Spencer only means that we cannot know our own soul otherwise than in and by its acts, he only asserts what has ever been taught by the schools to which he is the most opposed. No peripatetic ever taught that the soul could be known by us in its essence or otherwise than by its acts. If, on the other hand,

he would deny that we have direct consciousness of an enduring and persistent self, known to us by its acts, as being the author of our volitions, and the subject of our feelings and cognitions, then we might equally deny that he or any man can have any knowledge of his most familiar friend, since he can never know him save in and by some "act," and in some definite state. Similarly, that we cannot know the Ego except as "qualitatively differentiated," is most true, but it is true for the very simple reason that it never exists except in some state. A qualitatively undifferentiated Ego is a pure absurdity and an impossibility. No great wonder, then, that our intellects do not apprehend it. an attempt to deny our knowledge of the substantial Ego without at the same time implicitly asserting that knowledge, is really an effort to escape self-consciousness, which can be but very inadequately represented by the conception of a man trying to jump away from his own shadow.

But

Mr. Spencer goes on to observe (p. 148), "to know anything is to distinguish it as such or such-to class it as of this or that order." This is true enough of reflective representation, deliberate knowledge, but not of direct, presentative, indeliberative knowledge, and some knowledge must be direct, as otherwise we have a regressus ad infinitum.

No brute knows anything as such or such in the latter sense, though of course it does in the former, as a dog knows the smell of his own species, though not the "smelliness" of the smell, or a species as a species. Again, he says (p. 148), "to know the substance of the mind is to be conscious of some community between it and some other substance." But the question is whether the Ego, the mind, is not the type of unity and of substance to us. Moreover, it may be objected that we cannot know the material universe, since, according to this argument, we must for this "know of some community between it and some other " universe. He continues: "It is equally clear that mind remains unclassable, and therefore unknowable." It may be true that mind in the abstract may be unclassable, although it may be a species of the genus "realities" as distinguished from the genus "possibilities;" but unquestionably every concrete human mind is classable amongst "human minds," and the human mind is a spccies classable with the minds of pure spirits, and in a sense even with God. Indeed, how can Mr. Spencer assert (p. 148, § 60) our "absolute ignorance of the substance of mind," when he must admit that the mind knows that it knows, and therefore knows activity of its own of a definite kind, and itself as acting and reflecting, and therefore persisting, and therefore substance.

Mr. Spencer now proceeds to his grand type of sense-transformation, that alleged change of feeling of one kind, through more VOL. XXIII.—NO. XLVI. [New Series.]

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