science of mind, which, as I have already said, may almost be
regarded, in its most important aspects, as a sort of intellectual
chemistry,--there will appear the same alternate widening and narrowing
of classification. The mental phenomena are, in one age or country, of
many classes; in a succeeding age, or in a different country, they are
of fewer; and again, after the lapse of another age, or the passage of
a river or a mountain, they are of many more. In our own island, after
the decay of scholastic metaphysics, from _Hobbes_ to _Hume_,--if I
may use these names, as dates of eras, in a science, on which, with
all their unfortunate errors on many of the most important points of
human belief, they both unquestionably threw a degree of light, which
rendered their errors on these subjects the more to be lamented,--in
this long and brilliant period,--which, of course, includes, with
many other eminent names, the very eminent author of the _Essay on
the Human Understanding_,--there was a tendency to simplify, as much
as possible, the classification of the phenomena of mind; and more
regard, perhaps, was paid to the similarities of phenomena, than to
their differences. Subsequently to this period, however, the philosophy
of Dr Reid, and, in general, of the metaphysicians of this part of the
island, has had the opposite tendency,--to enlarge, as I conceive, far
beyond what was necessary, the number of classes which they considered
as too limited before;--and, in proportion, more regard has perhaps
been paid to the differences, or supposed differences of phenomena,
than to their resemblances. There can be no doubt, at least, that we
are now accustomed to speak of more powers or operations of the mind,
than even the schoolmen themselves, fond as they were of all the nicest
subtleties of infinitesimal subdivision.
The difference in this respect, however, is not so striking, when we
consider successions of ages, in which, of course, from our general
notion of the effects of time, we are accustomed to expect variety, as
when we look to neighbouring countries at the same period, especially
if we consider the advantage of that noble art, which might have been
supposed, by the wide diffusion which it gives to opinion, to have
removed, as to human sentiment, all the boundaries of mere geographic
distance. Slight, however, as the distance is which separates the two
countries, the philosophy of France, in its views of the phenomena
of mind, and the philosophy of Britain, particularly of this part of
Britain, have for more than half a century differed as much, as in
the philosophy of different ages; certainly in a degree far greater,
than, but for experience, it would have been easy for us to suppose.
In France, all the phenomena of mind have been, during that period,
regarded as sensations, or transformed sensations, that is to say, as
sensations variously simplified or combined. The works of Condillac,
who professed to have founded his system on that of Locke, but who
evidently did not understand fully what Locke intended, gave the
principal tone to this philosophic belief; and it has been fostered
since by that passion for the simple and the wonderful, which, when
these two objects can be united, is perhaps the strongest of all our
intellectual passions. In the system of the French metaphysicians,
they are united in a very high degree. That this universal presence of
sensation, whether true or false, is at least very _simple_, cannot
be denied; and there is certainly abundant matter of wonder in the
supposed discovery, that all the variety of our internal feelings are
those very feelings of a different class, to which they have so little
appearance of belonging. It is a sort of perpetual masquerade, in which
we enjoy the pleasure of recognizing a familiar friend in a variety of
grotesque dresses, and the pleasure also of enjoying the mistakes of
those around us, who take him for a different person, merely because
he has changed his robe and his mask. The fallacy of the doctrine is
precisely of that kind, which, if once admitted, is most difficult
to be shaken off. It relates to a system which is very simple, very
wonderful, and obviously true in part. Indeed, when there are so many
actual transformations of our feelings, so many emotions, of which the
principal elements are so little recognizable, in the complex affection
that results from them,--the supposition that all the varieties of
our consciousness may be only modes of one simple class of primary
feelings, false as it is, is far from being the most striking example
which the history of our science presents of the extravagance of
philosophic conjecture.
The speculations of the French school of philosophers, to which I have
now alluded, as to the supposed universal transmutations of feeling,
bear, as you can scarcely fail to have remarked, a very obvious
resemblance, in extreme simplicity, to the speculations of alchemists
on transmutations of another kind. The resemblance is stated with great
force by a living French author, himself a metaphysician of no humble
rank. I allude to a passage which you will find quoted by Mr Stewart,
in one of the valuable preliminary dissertations of his volume of
Essays, from a work of De Gerando.
“It required nothing less,”--says this ingenious writer,--“than the
united splendour of the discoveries brought to light by the new
chemical school, to tear the minds of men from the pursuit of a
simple and primary element; a pursuit renewed in every age, with an
indefatigable perseverance, and always renewed in vain. With what
feelings of contempt would the physiologists of former times have
looked down on the chemists of the present age, whose timid and
circumscribed system admits nearly _forty_ different principles in
the composition of bodies! What a subject of ridicule would the new
nomenclature have afforded to an alchemist!
“The Philosophy of Mind has its alchemists also; men whose studies are
directed to the pursuit of _one single principle_, into which the whole
science may be resolved; and who flatter themselves with the hope of
discovering the _grand secret_, by which the pure gold of truth may be
produced at pleasure.”[134]
This secret of the intellectual _opus magnum_, Condillac conceived
himself to have found; or, rather, as I have already said, he ascribed
the grand discovery to our own illustrious countryman. In this
reference the whole school of French metaphysicians have very strangely
agreed; conferring on Mr Locke a praise which they truly meant to do
him honour, but praise which the object of it would have hastened to
disclaim. He certainly was _not_ that _alchemist_ in the science of
mind which they conceived him to be; though he was a _chemist_ in it,
unquestionably, and a chemist of the highest rank.
FOOTNOTES:
[133] D. Heinsius. De Contemptu Mortis, Lib. i.
[134] Chap. I. Sect. ii. p. 15, 16. 4to. Edit.
LECTURE XXXIII.
ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE MENTAL PHENOMENA, BY LOCKE--BY
CONDILLAC--BY REID--A NEW CLASSIFICATION.
Gentlemen, in the conclusion of my last Lecture, I alluded to the
system of the French metaphysicians, as an instance of error from
_extreme simplification_ in the analysis of that class of our feelings
which we are now considering.
Of this system,--which deserves some fuller notice, on account both
of the great talents which have stated and defended it, and of its
very wide diffusion,--I may remark, in the first place, that it is
far from being, what its author and his followers consider it to be,
a mere developement of the system of our illustrious countryman. On
the contrary, they agree with Locke only in one point, and that a
negative one,--as to which all philosophers may now be considered as
unanimous,--the _denial_ of what were termed _innate ideas_. In every
thing which can be strictly said to be _positive_ in his system, this
great philosopher is nearly as completely opposed to Condillac and his
followers, as to the unintelligible wranglers of the ancient schools.
To convince you of this, a very slight statement of the two systems
will be sufficient.
According to Locke, the mind, to whose existence thought or feeling is
not essential, might, but for sensation, have remained forever without
feeling of any kind. From _sensation_ we acquire our first _ideas_,--to
use a word, which, from its ambiguity I am not very fond of using, but
which, from its constant occurrence, is a very important one in his
system. These ideas we cannot merely remember as past, and compound or
decompound them in various ways, but we can compare them in all their
variety of relations; and according as their objects are agreeable or
disagreeable, can love or hate those objects, and fear or hope their
return. We remember not external things only, so as to have ideas of
them,--ideas of sensation,--but we remember also our very _remembrance
itself_,--our abstractions, comparisons, love, hate, hope, fear, and
all the varieties of reflex thought, or feeling; and our remembrance
of these internal feelings, or operations of our mind, furnishes
another abundant source of ideas, which he terms ideas of reflection.
The _comparison_, however,--and it is this point alone which can be of
any consequence in reference to the French system,--the comparison, as
a state of the mind, even when it is exercised on our sensations or
perceptions, is not itself a sensation or perception,--nor is our hope,
or fear, or any other of our reflex feelings; for then, instead of
the two sources of our ideas, the distinction of which forms the very
groundwork of the Essay on the Human Understanding, we should truly
have but one source, and our ideas of reflection would themselves be
the very ideas of sensation to which they are opposed. Our sensations,
indeed, directly or indirectly give rise to our reflex feelings,
but they do not _involve_ them; they are only prior in order,--the
occasions, on which certain powers or susceptibilities of feeling in
the mind evolve themselves.
Such is the system of Locke, on those very points, on which the French
philosophers most strangely profess to regard him as their great
authority. But it is surely very different from the system, which they
affect to found on it. According to them, sensation is not merely that
primary affection of mind, which gives occasion to our other feelings,
but is itself, as variously composed or decomposed, all the variety
of our feelings. “If we consider,” says Condillac, in a paragraph,
which may be said to contain a summary of his whole doctrine, with
respect to the mind--“if we consider that to remember, to compare, to
judge, to distinguish, to imagine, to be astonished, to have abstract
ideas, to have ideas of number and duration, to know truths, whether
general or particular, are but so many modes of being attentive; that
to have passions, to love, to hate, to hope, to fear, to will, are but
so many different modes of desire; and that _attention_, in the one
case, and _desire_, in the other case, of which all these feelings
are modes, are themselves, in their origin, nothing more than modes
of sensation, we cannot but conclude, that sensation _involves_ in
itself--_enveloppe_--all the faculties of the soul.”[135]
Whatever we may think of this doctrine, as true or false, ingenious or
absurd, it seems, at least, scarcely possible, that we should regard
it as the doctrine of Locke--of him, who sets out, with a primary
division of our ideas, into two distinct classes, one class of which
alone belongs to sensation; and who considers even this class of our
mere ideas, not as involving all the operations of the mind with
respect to them, but only as the objects of the mind, in these various
operations;--as being what we compare, not the very feeling of our
comparison itself--the _inducements_ to passion, not what constitutes
any of our passions, as a state, or series of states, of the mind.
To render the paragraph, which I have quoted from Condillac, at all
accordant with the real doctrine of Locke, it would be necessary to
reverse it, in almost every proposition which it involves.
The doctrine, then, as exhibited by Condillac and his followers,
whatever merit it may have in itself, or however void it may be of
merit of any kind, is _not_ the doctrine of him from whom it is said to
be derived. But its agreement or disagreement with the system of any
other philosopher, is comparatively, of very little consequence. The
great question is, whether it be _just_,--whether it truly have the
merit of presenting a faithful picture of the mental phenomena, which
it professes to develope to us more clearly.
Have we reason to believe, then, that all the various feelings of our
mind, which form the classification of its internal affections, are
merely, to use Condillac's phrase, _transformed sensations_?
Transformed sensations, it is evident, on his own principles, though
the phrase might seem vague and ambiguous, in any other system, can
mean nothing more than sensations more or less lively, or more or less
complex. It cannot signify any thing that is absolutely different or
superadded; for, if there be any thing, in any complex feeling of
the mind, which did not originally form a sensation, or a part of a
complex sensation, this addition, however slight, is itself a proof,
that all the phenomena of the mind are not mere sensations, variously
repeated--that sensation, in short, does not “_involve_” all the
affections and faculties of the soul.
Is every feeling, then, in the whole series of our varied
consciousness, referable, in all its parts, to _sensation_, as its
original source?--not its source merely, in one very evident respect,
as that which is, in order, truly primary to all our other feelings,
but as that which essentially constitutes them all, in the same manner
as the waters of the fountain are afterwards the very waters which flow
along the mead?
To prove the affirmative of this, it is astonishing, with what
readiness Condillac,--who is generally regarded as a nice and subtile
reasoner, and who certainly, as his work on that subject shows, had
studied with attention the great principles of logic,--passes from
faculty to faculty, and from emotion to emotion, professing to find
sensation everywhere, without exhibiting to us even the semblance of
what he seeks, and yet repeating the constant affirmative, that he
_has_ found it,--as if the frequent repetition, were itself a proof
of what is frequently repeated,--but proving only that the various
feelings of the mind agree, as might be supposed, in being feelings of
the mind--not that they agree in being _sensations_, as that word is
used by himself, and as it is, in common philosophic use, distinguished
from the other more general term. Except the mere frequency of the
affirmation, and the unquestionable priority in order of time, of our
sensations to our other feelings,--there is not the slightest evidence,
in his system, of that universal transmutation which it affirms.
It may be necessary to mention, that, in these remarks on the system
of the illustrious preceptor of the Prince of Parma, I allude, in
particular, to his Treatise “_of Sensations_,” which contains his
more mature opinions on the subject--not to his earlier work, on _the
origin of human knowledge_, in which he has not ventured on so bold
a simplification; or at least, has not expressed it in language so
precise.
The great error of Condillac, as it appears to me, consists in
supposing that, when he has shown the circumstance from which any
effect _results_, he has shown this result to be essentially the _same_
with the circumstance which produced it.
Certain sensations have ceased to exist, certain other feelings have
immediately arisen;--these new feelings are therefore _the others_
under another shape. Such is the secret, but very false, logic, which
seems to pervade his whole doctrine on the subject.
If all that is meant were merely, that whatever may be the varying
feelings of the mind, the mind itself, in all this variety, when it
remembers or compares, hates or loves, is still the same substance,
as that which saw, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, there could be
nothing objectionable in the doctrine, but there would then certainly
be nothing new in it;--and, instead of thinking either of Locke or of
Condillac, we might think, at pleasure, in stating such a doctrine
of any of the innumerable assertors of the spirituality of the
thinking principle. Such, however, is not the meaning of the French
metaphysician. He asserts this identity of substance, indeed, like the
philosophers who preceded him, but he asserts still more. It is not the
permanent substance of _mind_ only which is the same. Its _affections_,
or states, which seem, in many respects, absolutely different, are
the same as those very affections, or states, from which they seem to
differ--and are the _same_, merely because they have succeeded them;
for, as I have already said, except the frequency of his affirmation,
that they are the same, there is no other evidence but that of the mere
succession in order of time, by which he attempts to substantiate their
sameness.
The origin of this false reasoning I conceive to be the analogy of
MATTER, to which his system, by reducing _all_ the affections of mind
to that class which is immediately connected with external things,
must have led him to pay peculiar attention. Yet, in justice to him,
I must remark, that, although a system which reduces every feeling to
mere sensation, and consequently connects every feeling, in its origin,
with the qualities of matter, must be favourable to materialism,
and has unquestionably fostered this, in a very high degree, in the
French school of metaphysics, there is no reason to consider Condillac
himself as a materialist; on the contrary, his works contain many very
just remarks on the errors of materialism. But still his system, as I
have said, by leading him continually to our organs of sense, and to
the objects which act upon them, must have rendered the phenomena of
matter peculiarly apt to recur to his mind in all its speculations.
Now, in _matter_, there can be no question as to the reality of that
transmutation, which, as applied to mind, forms the chief principle
of his intellectual analysis. In the chemistry of the material
elements, the compounds are the very elements themselves. When any
two substances, present together, vanish as it were from our view,
and a third substance, whether like or unlike to either of the former,
presents itself in their place, we believe this third substance,
however dissimilar it may appear, to be only the coexistence of the two
others; and indeed, since we have no reason to believe that any change
takes place, in the number of the corpuscles of which our planet is
composed, the whole series of its corpuscular changes can be only new
combinations of particles that existed before.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, in its application to the material world,
is in this respect philosophically accurate:
Tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas
Omnia destruitis, vitiataque dentibus ævi
Paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte.
Nec species sua cuique manet; rerumque novatrix
Ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras.
Nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo,
Sed variat faciemque novat; _nascique_ vocatur
Incipere esse aliud quam quod fuit ante,--_morique_
Desinere illud idem. Cum sint hue forsitan illa,
Hæc translata illuc, summa tamen omnia constant.[136]