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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.

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
 

With respect to the mere elements of matter, therefore, the present may be said, and truly said, to be exactly the past; and, in the whole series of phenomena of the material universe, from the moment of its creation to this present moment, there has been nothing new, but mere changes of relative position. This absolute sameness of result, in all the apparent changes of matter, Condillac applies, by a most unwarrantable extension, to the mere affections of the mind; and, because two affections of mind are followed by a third, he considers this third to be the two former co-existing, or, as he terms it, transformed. The feeling which follows another feeling, however seemingly different, is thus, in his system, the same, because it results from it; and it is very easy for him, in this way, to prove all our feelings to be sensations, by this simplest of arguments, that sensation was the first state induced in mind, and that, hence, since all our other feelings, of every species, must have followed it, they must have originated in it, and therefore, been this very sensation under a mere change of form. It is number one of the long series; and, if number two be a transformed sensation, because it results from number one, which was a sensation, number three must be equally so, because it follows number two; and thus, successively, the whole series. I perceive a hare; I perceive a sheep: – each of these separate states of my mind is a sensation. I cannot attend to them long, he says, without comparing them, and perceiving those circumstances of agreement, which lead me to apply to both the word quadruped. All this is most indubitably true. It is impossible, or, at least, it is not very common for us to observe any two animals long, together, without thinking of some of the circumstances in which they agree or differ. The one state of mind is a consequence of the other state of mind. But this is far from proving the comparison itself, as a subsequent state or phenomenon of the mind, to be the same mental state as the mere perception of the two animals which simply preceded it. If the evidence of our consciousness is to be trusted, it is very different; and in what other evidence can the assertion of their sameness be founded? We do not feel the state of mind, which constitutes the comparison, to be virtually equal to the two states of mind which constituted the separate perception, as we feel the relation of virtual equality between our notion of the number eight, and our notions of six and two combined; the one feeling does not virtually comprehend the two others, and it surely does not comprehend them in any grosser physical sense; for there certainly is nothing in the absolute spiritual unity of our thinking principle which can lead us to believe that the state or affection of mind which constitutes the perception of a horse, and the state or affection of mind which constitutes the perception of a sheep, unite, in that different state or affection of mind, which constitutes the comparison of the two, in the same manner as the solid chrystals of any salt unite, in solution, with the liquid which dissolves them. They do not involve or constitute, they merely give occasion to this third state, and give occasion to it, merely in consequence of the peculiar susceptibilities of the mind itself, as formed, by its divine Author, to be affected in this particular manner, after being affected in those different manners, which constitute the separate perceptions, as sensation itself, the primary feeling, was made, to depend on some previous organic affection produced by an external object. It is not, therefore, as being susceptible of mere sensation, but as being susceptible of more than mere sensation, that the mind is able to compare its sensations with each other. We may see, and certainly do see, objects together, without forming uniformly the same comparison; which could not be the case if the mere coexistence of the two perceptions constituted or involved the comparison itself. In the case of a horse and sheep, for example, though these, in the sensations which they excite, cannot, at different times, be very different, we compare, at different times, their colour, their forms, their magnitudes, their functions, and the uses to which we put them, and we consider them as related in various other ways. The perceptions being the same, the comparisons, or subsequent feelings of relation, are different; and though the relation cannot be felt but when both objects are considered together, it is truly no part of the perception of each. According to the French system, the science, which we now strangely regard as of difficult acquirement, would be nothing more than the mere opening of our eyes. Were we to shew to a peasant, absolutely unacquainted with the very elements of geometry, diagrams representing two right angles, and a plane triangle, he might certainly, though he could not give them names, perceive these figures as clearly as the most expert mathematician. Every thing which mere sensation could produce, in this case, would be the same in both; and nothing can be added to this primary sensation, since every thing is said to be actually involved in the sensation itself. Yet, with all his accurate perception of the figures, however clear, and vivid, and lasting, the peasant would not find, in this immediate perception, the equality of the two right angles taken together to the three angles of the triangle, or any other geometrical relation. The comparison, then, and the belief of an universal truth of proportion, which results from that comparison, are certainly something more than the mere sensation itself. They are, in short, new states of mind, as distinct from the mere perception of the figures in the diagram, as the perception of a circle itself differs from the perception of a square. To compare one animal with another, is, indeed, to have different visual images; but the mere coexistence of visual images is only a group, larger, or smaller, as the images are more or fewer, and all which transformation can do is to add to this group or take away from it. Innumerable objects may be, and are, continually present to us at once, so as to produce one complex affection of mind, – fields, groves, mountains, streams, – but the mere coexistence of these, so as to form in our thought one scene, involves no feeling of comparison; and if the mind had not been susceptible of other affections than those of sense, or of mere remembrance of the past objects of sense, either in whole or in part, it might, when such a scene was present, have existed forever in the state which forms the complex perception of the scene, without the slightest notion of the RELATION of its parts to the whole, or to each other.

When I thus attempt to prove, by so many wearying arguments, that the feeling which constitutes our comparison of our sensations, or, in other words, our belief of their agreement or disagreement, is itself a state of mind, different from either of the separate sensations which we compare, and different from both, as merely coexisting, I cannot but feel, what many of you have probably felt already, as if I were labouring to demonstrate a mere truism. Indeed, when I consider the argument as any thing more, it is necessary for me to call to mind the great name, and great talents, of the author whose system I oppose, – the praise which the system has received, of extreme subtlety of analysis, combined with extreme simplicity, and its wide diffusion, as the universal, or nearly universal, metaphysical creed, of one of the most enlightened nations of Europe.

But for these remembrances, I must confess, that the system which supposes our comparison to be the ideas compared, and nothing more, as if these had flowed together into one, would appear to me to correspond almost exactly with an ironical theory of the same process, and, indeed, of all the intellectual processes, proposed in our own country, – not in the Essay on Human Understanding, but in a very different work, – a theory which supposes comparison, or judgment, to be only the conflux of two ideas, in one propositional canal.

“Simple ideas are produced by the motion of the spirits in one simple canal: when two of these canals disembogue themselves into one, they make what we call a proposition: and when two of these propositional channels empty themselves into a third, they form a syllogism, or a ratiocination. Memory is performed in a distinct apartment of the brain, made up of vessels similar, and like situated to the ideal, propositional, and syllogistical vessels, in the primary parts of the brain. After the same manner, it is easy to explain the other modes of thinking; as also why some people think so wrong and perversely, which proceeds from the bad configuration of those glands. Some, for example, are born without the propositional or syllogistical canals; in others, that reason ill, they are of unequal capacities; in dull fellows, of too great a length, whereby the motion of the spirits is retarded; in trifling geniuses, weak and small; in the over-refining spirits, too much intorted and winding; and so of the rest.”¹³⁷

In examining the system of Condillac, which must certainly be allowed to bear a considerable resemblance to this system, I have instanced the feeling of relation, in comparison, merely as being one of the simplest examples which I could select. I might, with equal reason, have instanced other states of mind; in particular, all the variety of our emotions, —astonishment or desire, for example, which are as little sensations, in the philosophical meaning of the term, as they are fear or sorrow. The feeling of pleasure, in all its degrees of vividness or faintness, is a state of mind very different from that which constitutes desire of the recurrence of its object; for, otherwise, the desire would be itself the very gratification, which it supposes to be absent. It is induced, indeed, by the remembrance of the pleasure; but it is a consequence of the remembrance, not a part of it. It is like that general activity of life, to which amid the mild breathings of spring, the torpid animal awakes, that, in continual winter would have slumbered forever in insensibility, – or, like the bud, which, without warmth and moisture, never could have burst from the leafless stem; but which is still, in itself, something very different from the sunshine and the shower.

It seems to me not improbable, that the error of Condillac, and of the other French metaphysicians, who have adopted his leading doctrine, may have arisen in part, or, at least, may have escaped detection more readily, from the ambiguous signification of the word sentir, which is a verb originally, indeed, and strictly expressive of mere sensation; but applied also, by a sort of metaphorical extension, to our emotions and other affections of mind, that do not originate directly like sensation, in an external cause. Though this mere arbitrary word, however, may be applicable to a variety of feelings, it does not, therefore, follow, that these are all modifications of that small class of feelings, to which the word was, in its primary sense, confined, – any more than from the still wider use, in our language, of the term feeling, as applicable to all the states of the mind, it would follow, that these are all modes of affection of our sense of touch. Still, however, I cannot but think, that, if the term sentir had been of less vague application, a mind, so acute as that of Condillac, could not have failed to discover, in the imaginary proof which he offers of the intellectual transmutations of his simple and universal principles, those unwarrantable assumptions, which, even to humbler minds, seem so obvious, as scarcely to require for the detection of them, many moments' thought.

These observations, I flatter myself, have shown sufficiently the error of the system, which would convert all our feelings into sensations, in some indescribable state of metamorphosis. The system, I confess, appears to me a very striking example of an extreme, into which we are more apt to fall, from the very false notion, that it is characteristic of philosophic genius, – the extreme of excessive simplification, – which is evil, not merely as being false in itself, but, I may remark also, as being productive of the very confusion, to which simplicity is supposed to be adverse. When we think of love, or hate, or fear, or hope, as fundamentally and truly nothing more than affections of external sense, we try to recognize the original sensations of smell, taste, hearing, touch, and sight, which have been transformed into them; but we try in vain to recognize what is essentially different, and lose ourselves, therefore, in the attempt. We perceive every thing, as it were, through a mist, which it is impossible for our vision to penetrate, and we are at least as much perplexed by having only one object to seek amid the multitude, as if we considered all the phenomena of mind, without any classification whatever.

Before closing this slight review of the theory of transformed sensations, I must remark, that, even though it were strictly true, that all the feelings of the mind, if considered simply as feelings of the mind, are mere sensations varied or transformed by some strange internal process, undescribed and indescribable, – still, in conformity with every just principle of philosophizing, it would be necessary to form two classes of these mental phenomena, corresponding with the primary classification which we have made of them. That the mind should begin immediately to exist in a certain state, in consequence of the presence of external objects, so that it would not, at that moment, have existed in that state, but for the presence of the external object, is a proof of one set of laws, which connect mind directly and immediately with matter. That it should afterwards begin to exist in a similar state, without the recurrence of any external cause whatever, in consequence of its own susceptibilities only, is a proof of another set of laws peculiar to the mind itself. The complete difference of the cause, in the two instances, would justify, or rather require a different arrangement of the effect; as, when the same motion of a piece of iron is produced, at one time by impulse, at another by the presence of a magnet, at another by its mere gravity, we consider the motion, though itself the same in velocity and direction, as referable to different physical powers. With the same states of mind variously produced, we should still have to speak of external and internal mental susceptibilities of affection, as, with the same motions of a piece of iron variously produced, we speak of magnetism, impulse, gravitation.

The very celebrated system which I have now been combating, – a system, which, by the universality of transmutation supposed in it, truly deserves the name of intellectual alchymy, – may then be regarded as exemplifying one species of error in arrangement, – the error of a simplification beyond what the phenomena allow. This species of error, in the philosophy of mind, has not prevailed very generally in our country, – by far the more general tendency, especially on this part of the island, being to excessive amplification. Instead of wasting the labour of our analysis on elements that do not admit of any further decomposition, we have given up this labour too soon, and have classed, in many cases, as ultimate principles, what appear to me to be susceptible of still nicer analysis. The phenomena of mind are, accordingly, in the general technical language of the science, referred by us to many powers, which I cannot but think, are not so different as to furnish ground of ultimate distinction, but are truly only varieties of a few more simple powers or susceptibilities.