455 •' H77e 1830 THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 'A 'N 'asnJOjAs ~~" «30 Nia uiHdwvT l t>MO]f\vF\ \ AN ESSAY ON THE NATURE AND OBJECTS OF THE COURSE OF STUDY, IN THE CLASS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND AND LOGIC, IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. BY THE REV. JOHN HOPPUS, A.M. ••Sure I am, that all the light we can let in upon our own minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage, in directing our thoughts in the search ot other things." — Locke. SECOND EDITION. LONDON : PRINTED FOR JOHN TAYLOR, BOOKSELLER AND PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY, UPPER GOWER-STREET. 1830 LONDON: PHINTEl* BV THOMAS DAVISON, WHITEFE1AR3. mo AN ESSAY, ETC. It is the design of the following pages to explain, gene- rally and in brief, the nature of those studies to which the attention of the Students will be directed in the Class of Mental Philosophy and Logic ; and to point out some of the practical advantages which must result from these pursuits, if rightly conducted, as a prominent and essential branch of an enlightened and liberal education. In the boundless field of knowledge which lies open to human research, there are some objects which are evidently adapted to gain more immediate attention than others, either by the direct appeal they make to the senses, or their ob- vious connexion with the necessities of mankind. It is with the world itself, intellectually considered, as with the infant : the latter is chiefly the creature of sensation, and time must elapse ere the enlargement of its experience has brought into exercise faculties of a different and more exquisite order. Antiquity was the infancy of the world ; and it was natural that the sensible properties of things should first attract notice, and become the elements of the first rude attempts in science. Hence the splendour, the beauty, and the motions of the heavenly bodies; the overflow of rivers; thunder and light- ning ; the changes of the seasons ; together with the forms and qualities of plants and animals, the diseases of the hu- man frame, the decomposition of animal and vegetable sub- stances, the various agencies of fire, air, and water ; and, in B J33f short, all the more striking aspects of nature, were the facts which in the early ages of the world awakened the curiosity of man, and formed the basis of Astronomy, Chymistry, Medicine, and other sciences. These branches of knowledge, and all those which re- semble them in being derived from similar sources, have, in a general sense, been denominated the philosophy of nature. This expression however, even in the most extensive accept- ation in which it has usually been employed in modern times, by no means includes all the objects of scientific in- quiry. There is another sphere of investigation, which, though less obtrusive to common observation, and to the superficial eye almost shrouded from view, is by no means less interesting, or less worthy to be explored. The most indisputable of all evidence, the evidence of our conscious- ness, assures us of the existence of certain powers and sus- ceptibilities, or faculties, totally different from any which are exhibited by the mass of objects that surround us ; and we feel that these faculties are peculiarly our oxvn. From this source, therefore, arises a new and separate department of knowledge, quite distinct from that which is derived from the wonders of mere sensible nature, comprising whatever relates to the operations of that still more wonder- ful instrument by which these wonders are surveyed; namely, that which thinks, or what we denominate mind. It requires nothing more than due reflection on that end- less succession of thoughts and feelings, and their infinitely diversified combinations, which form the conscious existence of every day, to convince us that these mental phenomena are not less curious, or less determinate, than those of ex- ternal nature, to which indeed they have a more intimate relation than we might in the first instance be ready to ima- gine. This self-inspection will not fail soon to reveal to the attentive inquirer some of the arcana of that world within, which, though on a cursory glance it appears so dim and shadowy, and will never cease, in common with all the other spheres of knowledge, to have its regions of mystery and 5 darkness, demands only to be patiently and carefully sur- veyed, in order to manifest that it is as truly subjected by its great Author to general and fixed laws as the material universe itself. The consideration of these various facts in our sentient and intellectual nature ; this survey of the mechanism, so to speak, of the inner man ; this introversion, as it were, of the intellectual eye, with a view to the analysis of the mental operations, their arrangement, the order of their suc- cession, and a variety of collateral topics, which it is at pre- sent unnecessary to detail, is what we mean by the Philo- sophy of the Human Mind, of which Logic may be considered as a part. The view it is proposed to take of this branch of education in the Class, regards chiefly the mental powers and suscep- tibilities considered in themselves ; or in other words, the various states of sensation, idea, or emotion, in which the mind, under the changing circumstances in which it is con- stantly placed, is found to exist. The rectitude of any of these states, as determined by the will of God, and right reason, or the nature and rule of moral excellence, constitutes a distinct branch of science, under the name of Ethics, or Moral and Political Philosophy ; including whatever im- mediately relates to the philosophy of private, social, and public virtue. The above aspect of the Philosophy of Mind, in which it is viewed principally as to its mere faculties or various ac- tual states, has sometimes been termed its physiology ; im- plying the doctrine of its functions simply, in allusion to that part of medical science which treats of the functions of the animal frame. It has also been called the physics of the mind ; its mere properties and laws, apart from their moral relations, being viewed as an object of natural science. With what propriety these terms, which general custom has appropriated to other uses, may be applied to mind, is, in part at least, a question of nomenclature only ; nor is it ne- b 2 G cessary that this question should now be entertained. Still more foreign to the present purpose would it be to hazard any rem. irks on the subject of the most philosophical divi- sion of which science in general may be deemed susceptible. Though the appearances of external nature, from the strong and incessant appeal they make to the senses, were so much calculated, as above remarked, to become the earliest objects of scientific inquiry, it was nevertheless im- possible that some of the more obvious attributes of mind itself could remain unnoticed, even in the utmost infancy of the history of man. Accordingly all languages are found to be furnished with words, or names, which designate the faculties of memory > imagination, reason, and the like, how- ever little the possible analysis of these mental functions was regarded as an object of philosophical discussion. The lite- rature of the earliest nations indeed, with the exception of the Hebrews, was so blended with the fictions of a poetical thcogony, that little can be certified respecting any opinions that were entertained among them as to the analysis of the operations of the human mind ; or rather it is sufficiently evident that this field of inquiry was almost entirely un- known as an object of science. Till the time of Plato and Aristotle, scarcely any thing, we apprehend, that is definite can be gathered on this sub- ject from the philosophical speculations that were current even among the Greeks, imbued and mystified as they were with the high colouring of the eastern polytheism. The philosophy that predominated previously to the rise of these brilliant luminaries of the ancient world was the Pytha- gorean ; and though some of its principles, more immediately regarding the Deity, were more rational and consistent than those entertained by some of the schools that arose in sub- sequent ages, the chief philosophy relating to the human mind seems to have consisted in the favourite tenet of the transmigration of souls, of which the alleged metempsychosis of Pythagoras himself was accounted an example: Ipse ego, nam memini, Trojani tempore belli, Paranoides Euphorbus eram. Quoslibet occupat artus Spiritus ; eque feris humana in corpora transit, Inque feras noster. — Ov. Metam. xv. The succeeding period in the history of Grecian philo- sophy, distinguished as it is by the genius of Plato and Aristotle, and by the schools that adorned the groves of Academus and the banks of the Ilissus, of which they were the founders, is universally allowed to have been its most illustrious eera. The time, however, was even yet far distant when the human mind, emancipated from the despotism of its own fancies, and the authority of names, w r as to acquire that high discipline in the pursuit of truth which was necessary to enable it to form a just and sober estimate of itself; and when it was to arrive at an intel- lectual self-command which should restrain it from that Daedalian flight, to which it was ever prone, into aerial regions of speculation, where its powers were consumed in an element unsuited to their weakness, as the fabled wings of Icarus were melted in the attempt to approach too near the sun. Were we not aware how late it was in the history of the world before the true inductive philosophy — the philosophy of fact and reason — broke the spells of imagination and ro- mance, and decidedly obtained that dominion which it now possesses over the whole empire of natural science, it migh appear surprising that whatever related to the mind and its faculties should so long have presented to view nothing but a rude and indigested series of wild and visionary speculations. What is more familiar among the phenomena of mind than that under certain circumstances that condition of it which is termed sensation is produced ; and that under other circumstances another state of consciousness arises, which we term having an idea ? The moon is in the sky ; our eyes are open, and are directed to that part of the heavens in which she is shining : we have a sensation of 8 sight ; we see the moon. She has now run her course, and is no longer visible in our hemisphere; but the word moon, if it even accidentally reach our car, is sufficient to call up the moon's spectre, so to speak, in the mind ; and we are conscious of having an idea of the moon, which, though less vivid than the previous sensation, is still perfect in its kind, and which we feel to be as truly a part of our consciousness as the sensation itself. It was some two thousand years, however, from the time that these facts seem to have en- gaged the attention of philosophers, before it was conceived they might probably be ultimate elements in man's sentient and intellectual nature; that is, facts of which no explanation can be given. It was always supposed that the mind did not perceive the objects of sense directly and immediately ; but that some kind of filmy and etherial representations of them must intervene, which were termed phantasms, shadows, forms, or images of the real objects. In conformity with this ideal philosophy, Plato, in the seventh book of his " Republic,"" compares the mind to a person in a dark cave, and so situated as to perceive the shadows only, and not the realities, of the objects that are passing without. These shadows or " ideas'" were said to be but copies of their true antitypes and originals, which were affirmed to exist in the Divine Mind as the only real essences. Aristotle, though he is immortalised by his Science of Logic, if more minute on the subject of perception than his scarcely less renowned preceptor, was by no means more happy, or more satisfactory, in his speculations. He, and his followers, maintained that these images, or forms, were im- pressed on the organs of sense ; and in this stage of their pro- gress they were termed sensible species : by some refinement, which they subsequently underwent, they became objects of memory, and were now called phantasms ; by a still more subtile and refining process, they were fitted to be objects of knowledge; having at length arrived at a rank, which it is 9 presumed will not now be very readily conceded to them, namely, that of intelligible species. The long reign of Aristotle and his commentators in the schools, was equally unfavourable both to natural and mental science. It was a millennium of slumber to the hu- man intellect, during which the fantastic dreams of ima- gination usurped the province of reason; and notwithstanding- all the warfare of disputation, in which a claim was laid to the universal domain of truth, the faculties of the mind, so far as all useful purposes were concerned, made but feeble achievements, and laboured under a kind of paralysis. The scholastic sect of philosophers, which arose principally from the prevailing fashion of commenting on Aristotle, rendered Logic ridiculous by perverting it to the support of the most absurd quibbles and the most unfounded hypotheses, and left on the very name of " Metaphysics 1 " a lasting odium. Ludovicus Vives describes these philosophers of the middle ages in terms which claim for them at least some of those imposing titles that were conferred on them by their admiring disciples. Of these doctors, who, if not " seraphic" or " perspicuous," were, it must be allowed, not unfrequently " most resolute''' and " invincible" he thus speaks : " I have seen the combatants, after having exhausted their stock of verbal abuse, proceed to blows ; nor was it uncommon, in these quarrels about metaphysical terms and ideas, which neither party understood, to witness the combatants first employing their fists, then their clubs, and finally their swords, by which many were wounded, and some killed. 1 ' It was unfortunate for mental philosophy that, by being associated with the pursuits of the scholastics, it should have been identified with so much that was absurd, unintelligible, and useless ; and thus have been exposed to the neglect or con- tempt of those who find it easy to depreciate what they do not understand, and who are either unable or unwilling to distinguish the ontology and dialectic folly of the schools, from the Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind, and the practical Logic of the Novum Organum of Bacon. 10 The last named illustrious reformer of science, meriting, as he is generally allowed to do, the honourable appellation of Father of the Experimental Philosophy of Nature, was fitted to give that impulse and direction which he did to the labours of his successors, principally by the genius he pos- sessed for rightly estimating both the powers and the limits of the human mind. His philosophical writings in general, and especially his work Dc Dignitate et Angmentis Scien- tiarum, abound in trains of thought which are admirably calculated to lead to more proper views than any that had previously been entertained of the scope and aim of intel- lectual science. Notwithstanding the tincture that is to be found in his works of ancient hypotheses and habits of thinking, from which indeed it was too much to expect that he should at once practically deliver himself, his accurate delineation of the chief erroneous associations of ideas, or prejudices, under which the human mind is wont to labour, the innumerable important hints he has thrown out on some of its operations, and the perpetual demand he enforces to have every subject of inquiry submitted to the test of the inductive logic, entitle him to the highest rank among the contributors to a just intellectual philosophy. His genius resembled the morning sun, which, though many shadows of the night may cling around his orb, has power to dart his rays through them all to the remotest objects, and holds forth, at his rising, the pledge and promise of a brighter day. Descartes, who flourished at the beginning of the 17th century, and was contemporary with Bacon, has the praise of more clearly stating, probably, than any one of his prede- cessors, the necessity of studying the human mind simply on the evidence of its own consciousness ', and of avoiding, as much as possible, being misled by those analogies, borrowed from the properties of matter, which are liable to prove so great a source of error when applied to phenomena which are of a nature so totally unlike any of those we witness in the material world. " What am I ?" asks Descartes. " I 11 am a being susceptible of thought — but what is this being ? a being that doubts, understands, affirms, denies ; that is willing and unwilling, etc. I am convinced, therefore, that none of the things that are comprehensible by the ima- gination, things corporeal, can give me the knowledge of myself; and the mind should be carefully abstracted from these, that it may have a distinct conception of its own nature.'" The victory which these and similar passages seem to indicate their author to have gained over the strongest prejudices of sense, at a time when the light of the new philosophy had only begun to dawn on the idealism of the schools, has induced Mr. Stewart to pronounce that these views, " when first given to the world, formed the greatest step in the science of mind ever made by a single individual; and when Descartes,"" adds this distinguished writer, "esta- blished it as a general principle, that nothing conceivable by the power of imagination could throw any light on the operations of thought, he laid the foundation-stone of the Experimental Philosophy of the Human Mind.*" It is a remarkable illustration of the slow progress of the human faculties in the practical attainment and use of truth, that Descartes, though meriting such an encomium as the above, should have so completely abandoned, as he did, his own fundamental principle, in his theories respecting the connexion and communication between the body and the mind. The soul, he affirms, has its seat in that part of the brain called the pineal gland, or conarion ; and he details, as if stating an indisputable fact,, the process by which the " an imal spirits" by progressive and retrograde motions, keep up a perpetual communication between the mind and every part of the body ; a doctrine which contributed to furnish the muse of Prior with materials for one of its happiest efforts : " Alma, they strenuously maintain, Sits cock-horse on her throne, the hrain, And from the seat of thought dispenses Her sovereign pleasure to the senses." Prion's Alma. 12 The publication of Locke's Essay on Human Under- standing, and its rapid and extensive circulation, maybe re- garded as constituting a new aera in the history of mental science. During fourteen years, its author lived to see it pass through seven editions; and though, like every other effort to benefit mankind, by holding up to them the torch of truth, and teaching them to rejoice in the light for its own sake, this great work excited the alarm and the opposition of those who were interested in preventing the intellectual and moral progress of the human race — nevertheless the philosophy of Locke speedily gained ground, not only in England and Scotland, but also in several parts of the con- tinent of Europe ; and, within half a century, it had even found its way into the fashionable coteries of the French metropolis. Whatever defects in the precise use of lan- guage, or other errors, the researches of subsequent labourers in the same field may have brought to light in this cele- brated Essay, certain it is, that the sincere and ardent pursuit of truth, the originality of thought, and the constant appeal to reason, which characterize it, not to add the sim- plicity and energy of its style, were eminently calculated to impart a sympathetic tone to future inquiring minds, and to effect that salutary change in the general habits of thinking on the topics it treats of, which has followed in its train. It was, in short, the first grand, systematic ex- hibition of the spirit of the Baconian philosophy applying itself to the investigation of mind ; and instead of being surprised that one individual should not have achieved every thing, we may rather admire the genius that had power, under the existing circumstances, to accomplish so much. As it is by no means the intention of the present pages to detail the history of the Philosophy of Mind, or to dwell minutely on the respective merits of those who have written on it, but chiefly to give some general idea of its nature and objects to those to whom the subject may be new, and to glance hastily at the manner in which it has gradually as- sumed the form and consistency of a science, few only, even 13 of the names of those can be mentioned, who have con- tributed, each his portion, either toward clearing away the fabrics of error, or laying the foundations of truth. In this, as in every other branch of human knowledge, one philosopher has stood, as it were, on the pedestal reared by another ; one has proceeded to fill up the outline, which was already sketched by a former hand ; and each one has been more or less indebted for some new train of thought to the unwrought materials bequeathed to him by his less advan- tageously situated predecessor. Nor is it a fact peculiar to the history of this science, that some who have most suc- cessfully pursued certain topics of inquiry, have on others been the most completely led astray by the ignis jatuus of an undisciplined imagination. Kepler, who en- riched astronomy with the admirable discovery of the laws of the planetary motions, was persuaded, from certain fan- cied analogies, that the planets must be precisely six in number ; and he acknowledged that his first concern, on hearing of the discovery of the four satellites of Jupiter by Galileo, was, how he could save his favourite scheme, which was in j eopardy from this increase in the n umber of the planets ! In addition to the writers already noticed, who have con- tributed to intellectual science, the names of Hobbes, Berke- ley, Hartley, and Hume, not to mention others, are among the most conspicuous ; each of which philosophers may be regarded as, at the same time, a specimen both of the strength and the weakness of the human mind — as exhibiting the combination of that acute and patient research which has added many valuable facts and illustrations to the stock of our knowledge, with a devotedness to the most gratuitous or fanciful hypotheses, and in some instances, with worse than merely intellectual errors. Hartley's attempt to ac- count for our sensations, ideas, and emotions, by mechanical vibrations in the nerves and brain, or Berkeley's argument against the existence of matter, is not necessarily connected with ill moral consequences ; but Hobbes's denial of any other distinction between right and wrong than what de- 14 ponds on the mere arbitrary will of the civil magistrate, and Hume's universal scepticism, are at variance with the happiness of mankind. It is thus, however, that the Philosophy of Mind has gra- dually derived accessions from various sources, and, by the perpetual collisions of truth and error, has assumed the im- proved form which it exhibits in the hands of its more modern cultivators, especially in Scotland ; a country in which, for nearly a century past, it may be affirmed to have met with more successful attention than in anv other, and where it has had the good fortune to escape being identified with that mysticism and romance which have too much characterized it in some parts of the Continent. Lord Bacon has remarked, that one source of error to the human mind is the tendency it often exhibits to imagine a greater uniformity in nature than actually exists; and the passion for systems, which has misled so many powerful minds, is nearly allied to such a bias. Little doubt can be entertained that to this cause may be traced much of the supposed uncertainty of speculations on mind. The fate, however, of successive systems, one perishing and another rising on its ruins, from which the argument of uncertainty is usually derived, militates nut against the subject, but against the method of philosophy. When the phaenomena of nature in general began to be studied simply by the light of observation and experiment, and the facts, what- ever they might be, were carefully registered and compared, the whole aspect of physical science began to change, and to assume a definite and certain form; and the order and beauty of truth arose out of the chaos and darkness of the scho- lastic ages. This inductive method may safely be pronounced the only one that is suited to the weakness and limitation of the human faculties — the only sure guide out of the labyrinth of error ; and in proportion as it is applied to the investi- gation of the laws of mind, will those laws, like any other facts in nature, become truly ascertained. It is, if we mis- take not, principally to the circumstance of the spirit of the 15 inductive philosophy having more deeply imbued the minds of the Scottish writers than those of some of their cotempo- raries in Germany, that the superiority of the Northern school is to be traced ; and that under such auspices as those of Reid, Stewart, and Brown, the genius of intellectual in- quiry presents the aspect of a traveller, not arrayed indeed in the plendid attire of the " Transcendental Philosophy *," but patiently toiling onward in the path which must ultimately lead to the temple of Truth, and claiming for his labours the name and dignity of Science. In the Universities of Scotland, it is well known that Men- tal Philosophy and Logic form constituent parts of the general instruction of youth ; and in the course of education published by the Council of the University of London, to be pursued by the Students, it is made to occupy the same prominent and important place. In this Class their attention will be directed to every topic that can properly come under the denomination of the Philosophy of Mind, from its most simple and familiar states of sensation, in smell, taste, hear- ing, sight, and touch, to its most complex phaenomena of thought and emotion, Hence the various orders of ideas, simple and complex; the association of ideas; memory; imagination ; attention ; habit ; the artifices the mind em- ploys to facilitate and abbreviate its operations in abstraction and generalisation, together with other uses of language ; evidence; reasoning; belief; the will; the passions, or emo- tions, viewed as states of the mind ; and a variety of other inquiries, both immediate and collateral, and too numerous now to be mentioned, will form the elements on which the student will be taught to exercise and discipline his faculties in the pursuit of truth : and this object will be promoted not merely by oral communication, but also by perpetual and various themes, exercises, and examinations. Of the Philosophy of Mind, Logic, as before intimated, is properly a branch, since it has a direct reference to one of the most important of the mental operations. It mav be * Vid. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. 1G viewed either as the .sc'tfiicc or the art of reasoning. In its stricter acceptation, as a science, it consists of the analysis of that process of the mind ; while in its wider sense, as an art, it includes the practical rules on which all ratiocination is to be conducted, for the avoidance of error and the attainment of truth. Its principles are completely developed in the Orga- noid of Aristotle ; and, so far as relates to induction, its ma- terials may be found, to a considerable extent, in the Novum Organum of Bacon, which embodies the spirit of that method of pursuing philosophical inquiries to which mainly is owing the rapid advancement of science in modern times. In conducting his pupils through the fertile field of the Intellectual and Logical Philosophy, it will be the aim of the Professor to make their studies not only useful, but also inte- resting ; in materials for doing which, if he mistakes not, many of the topics that will present themselves to their notice will by no means be wanting. The great object will be, to cause them to think for themselves ; and the idea of teaching, rather than of merely lecturing, will constantly be kept in view. This, at all events, must be the case, in pro- portion as the Class shall be found to require elementary instruction, and to be formed to that close reflection on what passes within their own minds, and to those habits of mental analysis, which are rarely possessed by very young persons, and are never acquired without continuous and diligent efforts. In whatever manner circumstances, as they arise, may dictate any modification of the plan of teaching, the important object will invariably be aimed at, of rendering the course of instruction as efficient as possible, in promoting the practical ends of a liberal and useful education. The extensive advantages resulting from the cultivation of mental and logical science in general, and the practical utility of devoting to it a portion of that valuable period of life which is allotted to the great purpose of acquiring elementary education, are too obvious to those who have paid any attention to this branch of knowledge to require the" support of argument. Since it must be confessed, however. that this department of learning has no! hitherto constituted 17 so prominent an ingredient as it merits, in the systems of edu- cation pursued in the southern part of Britain, though it has long held so distinguished a rank in the Scottish Universities, itmay be proper to dwell somewhat at large on the advantages which attach to its pursuit. Preliminary to this, it will not be irrelevant to our purpose to glance atone or two of those erroneous notions which have existed with regard to the nature of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, and which, even in the present age, have not entirely subsided. One of these, and to which allusion has already been made, is, that an uncertainty attaches to it, in consequence of its being supposed to rest on a footing totally different, with regard to our knowledge, from that of those sciences which have matter for their immediate object; whereas, in reality, the situation of both these general branches of knowledge is in this respect the very same. Nothing, indeed, can be more different than the two classes of phsenomena which matter and mind exhibit to our observation ; the one being known to us by its colour, extension, solidity, and other familiar sensible properties ; the other, by sensations, ideas, volitions, and a whole train of feelings equally peculiar, every one of which is totally unlike any of the qualities we assign to matter : yet a little reflection is sufficient to con- vince us that our notions, both of matter and of mind, agree in this, namely, that they are not direct, but only relative. All we know of matter is, the properties that belong to it ; and precisely the same is the case with mind itself. What- ever, therefore, can be truly ascertained as a fact or event, with regard to the affections of either, becomes as truly a part of our knowledge in the one case as in the other. What we ourselves are conscious of in the laws of mind, and what we witness of the operation of similar laws in the minds of others, we know as really as what we perceive in the laws of matter ; both are alike known only by observation and induction. Any uncertainty that may attach to our con- clusions in either case in any given instance, arises cither from the difficulty of procuring sufficient data, or from our 18 deriving wrong inferences from the existing premises ; to both which evils some of the more complex mental pheno- mena, it must be allowed, are peculiarly liable. Neither of these sources of error, however, is confined to the science of mind. It has also been contended, by way of objection to the Intellectual Philosophy, that as the inquiries connected with it are " not of the nature of experiment, but of observation merely, 11 the laws which Bacon has sketched out for the regulation of experimental induction are in this department " without authority. 11 It must indeed be acknowledged that mind cannot, like matter, be subjected to the crucible; nor can its various states of sensation, thought, and emotion, be actually dissevered, and separately exhibited to view, like the rays of the prismatic spectrum : we have not here, in short, the same kind of command over the objects to be in- vestigated, which matter often enables us, by its inertia and its divisibility, to acquire. The discoveries, however, which are brought to light by observation and by experi- ment, are precisely of the same kind ; both rest on the same ultimate basis, since experiment is nothing more than one form of the observation of nature. This objection, moreover, evidently tends to depreciate one highly important branch even of physical science, and one which is now considered as not yielding in the certainty of its conclusions to any part of human knowledge; namely, astronomy. Surely Bacon never anticipated that this most exact of sciences would ever be regarded as less within the sphere of the inductive philosophy than any other ! It scarcely needs to be added, that the effects which astronomy has produced in navigation, geo- graphy, and chronology, sufficiently prove that observation, as well as direct manual experiment, may issue in an " in- crease of power," and that it does not of necessity become a mere "gratification of curiosity." A prejudice, moreover, has not been wanting against Mental Philosophy, arising from its association with the term " metaphysics" This word appears to have originated 19 with Andronicus of Rhodes who was employed in editing the writings of Aristotle, when the manuscripts were brought to Rome by Sylla, after his conquest of Athens. Androni- cus is said to have prefixed to certain books the title, To. /jyira ra