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1838.] conquered the whole world in his country's cause, returns to enslave the land that gave him birth, Science, coming home laden with the spoils of the universe, will turn her arms against him whose banner she bore, and in whose service she fought and triumphed. By benumbing a vitality she cannot grasp, and by denying or passing by, blindly or in perplexity, a freedom she can neither realize nor explain, she will do her best to bring him under the dominion of the well-known laws which the rest of the universe obeys. But all her efforts ever have been, and ever shall be, unavailing. She may indeed play with words, and pass before us a plausible rotation of "faculties." She may introduce the causal nexus into thought, and call the result "association." But the man himself is not to be found in this "calculating machine." He, with all his true phenomena, has burst alive from under her petrific hand, and leaves her grasping "airy nothings," not even the shadow of that which she is striving to comprehend; for, though she can soar the solar height, and gaze unblinded on the stars, man soars higher still, and, in his lofty region, she has got waxen wings, that fall to pieces in the blaze of the brighter sun of human freedom.

These things are spoken of physical science; but they apply equally to the science of the human mind, because this science is truly and strictly physical in its method and conditions, and, to express it in general terms, in the tone it assumes, and the position it occupies, when looking at the phenomena of man. As has been already hinted, it is not wonderful that man, when endeavouring to comprehend and take the measure of himself, should, in the first instance at least, have adopted the tone and method of the physical sciences, and occupied a position analogous to that in which they stand. The great spectacle of the universe is the first to attract the awakening intelligence of man; and hence the earliest speculators were naturalists merely. And what is here true in the history of the race, is true also in the history of the individual. Every man looks at nature, and, consciously or unconsciously, registers her appearances long before he turns his eyes upon himself. Thus a certain method, and certain conditions, of inquiry, are fixed; what is considered the proper and pertinent business of science is determined, before man turns his attention to himself. And when he does thus turn it, nothing can be more natural, or indeed inevitable, than that he should look at the new object altogether by the light of the old method, and of his previously-acquired conception of science. But man not having been taken into account when these conceptions were first formed, and when this method was fixed, the question comes to be—how does this application of them answer when man forms the object of research? For it is at least possible, that, in his case, the usual mode of scientific procedure may misgive.

It is unfair to condemn anything unheard. It is idle and unreasonable to charge any science with futility without at least endeavouring to substantiate the charge, and to point out the causes of its failure. Let us, then, run a parallel between the procedure of science as applied to nature, and the procedure of science as applied to man, and see whether, in the latter case, science does not occupy a position of such a nature, that if she maintains it, all the true phenomena for which she is looking necessarily become invisible; and if she deserts it, she forgoes her own existence. For, be it observed, that the "science of the human mind" claims to be a science only in so far as it can follow the analogy of the natural sciences, and, consequently, if its inability to do this to any real purpose be proved, it must relinquish all pretensions to the name.

In the first place, then, what is the proper business and procedure of the natural sciences? This may be stated almost in one word. It is to mark, register, and classify the changes which take place among the objects constituting the material universe. These objects change, and they do nothing more.

In the second place, what is the proper business and procedure of science in its application to man? Here science adopts precisely the same views, and follows precisely the same method. Man objectises himself as "the human mind," and declares that the only fact, or at least that the sum total of all the facts appertaining to this object, is that it is visited by certain changes constituting its varieties of "feeling," "passion," "states of mind," or by whatever other name they may be called, and that the only