Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/62

 PSYCHOLOGICAL PBINCTPLES. (ill.) 49 If Mind is to be viewed as having functions it must be viewed as an agent. When we look for a description of the three functions, we find in each case that an enumeration is given us instead, and that the facts enumerated are ranged under three different categories. Feeling 1 includes certain impressions, states or modes of excitement ; Will comprises certain actions, and Intellect includes certain powers. Now states, actions and powers are certainly not congruent con- ceptions : a state or an impression is not a function, though to receive an impression or to change a state may be ; a function again is not an action, but the performance of an action, and even powers are not functions though necessarily presupposed in them. Let us descend to further detail. There is an immense advance on his Scottish predecessors in Prof. Bain's analysis of Intellect into the three functions of Discrimination, Similiarity and Eetentiveness, instead of the old medley of "powers known as Perception, Memory, Conception," &c., &c. But it must strike anybody who has any sense of the import of suffixes, that discrimina^Vw, similarity and Tetentiveness have, so to say, very different logical ' di- mensions '. Hamilton, though he could not get on with less than six intellectual faculties, did at least contrive to make them all -ives. Prof. Bain could, of course, easily have used the terms Discrimination, Assimilation, Conservation, or the like, if he had chosen ; and these terms are all of the general form SPO. 2 But there is a reason why this even and explicit indication of transitive activity is avoided or missed : it is not from any sentimental antipathy to specula- tion or any anti-theological bias these are matters that do not trouble a psychologist who ' keeps his eyes in the boat'. The reason lies rather in the ambiguity of the term con- sciousness, which occurs once and again in the exposition. As Prof. Bain has himself pointed out, the proper meaning of conscious state or state of consciousness is "mental life as opposed to torpor or insensibility ; the loss of conscious- ness is mental extinction for the time being " (Appendix, p. 93). But if this be the proper meaning of consciousness, it seems obvious that one is guilty of a sort of fallacy of division in calling a sensation, e.g., a conscious state. We might as well resolve a man physically into an aggregate of smaller men (like Hobbes's Leviathan), as call each and all of the 1 It is one of the many grievous defects of our English nomenclature that we have no word which, like the German Das Gemiith, runs naturally on all-fours beside Will and Intellect. 2 See former paper, MIND, viii. 468, note. 4