Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/497

 is taken from Locke and improved, and is very large and comprehensive. He makes them to be eight in number: Resemblance, identity, space and time, quantity, quality, contrariety, cause and effect. He exerts all his ingenuity, I believe fruitlessly, to show that these can not extend our knowledge beyond impressions and ideas, which are mere reproduction of impressions. They are relations of impressions and ideas, and not of things. We meet this skepticism on the part of Hume and agnosticism on the part of Huxley by maintaining that what we perceive originally are things, and what we perceive by the faculty that discovers relations are relations of things. When we classify plants by their resemblances, we classify the plants and not impressions. When we decide that a thing which begins to be must have a cause, we have a reality: first, in the thing that begins to be; which implies, secondly, a reality in the cause which we regard as producing it. It is thus that we argue that the present configuration of the earth, being an objective reality, is the result of agencies which acted thousands or millions of years ago. It is thus we argue that the adaptations we see in the eye must have had a cause in an adapting, that is, a designing power. Professor Huxley's account of the relations which the mind can discover is much more meager than that of Hume. Apparently, following Professor Bain, he makes them consist in coexistence, succession, and similarity. He thus gets rid dexterously of the relations of quantity on which mathematics, with all their certainty, so obnoxious to the skeptic, depends; and of identity, which certifies to the soul's continued and permanent existence; and of causation, which leads us from harmonies and adaptations, from order and design in nature, to rise to a producing power in a designing Mind. The three which he acknowledges—similarity, coexistence, and succession—are all regarded as relations among impressions and ideas, and tell us nothing as to realities.

This is the intellectual furniture of the mind, according to Huxley. Observe what it is: Impressions, Ideas, and Relations among these. He calls these the "Contents of the Mind." It is the most miserably defective account of the mental powers I have met with anywhere; more so than that given even by Condillac and the sensational school of France, who gave to the mind a power of transforming its sensations into a considerable number and variety of elevated ideas.

4. Having thus allotted to the mind so small a content, he finds it the more easy to refer the whole to cerebral and nervous action. "The upshot of all this is, that the collection of perceptions which constitutes the mind is really a system of effects, the causes of which are to be sought in antecedent changes of the matter of the brain, just as 'the collection of motions' which we call flying is a system of effects, the causes of which are to be sought in the modes of motion of the muscles of the wings. . . . What we call the operations of the mind are functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products