Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/124

114. These three functions, however much they are mingled in our mental operations, are yet totally distinct properties, and each the groundwork of a different superstructure. As an ultimate analysis of the mental powers, their number cannot be increased or diminished; fewer would not explain the facts, more are unnecessary. They are the intellect, the whole intellect, and nothing but the intellect."

This resolution of the intellect into ultimate discriminations of likenesses and differences among things recognized, remembered, and thought about, and, as a consequence, the growth or development of the intellect as a successive combination and recompounding of these relations of discrimination, is an immense step forward in the progress of scientific psychology, because it first brings into close correspondence the two orders of activity. Instead of merely wondering at the brain as an inexplicable mass of mucilage, we now regard it as an organism built up with exquisite delicacy out of thousands of millions of cells and fibres, with myriads of intimate connections, all guarded most securely and put into multiplied and marvelous relations with the external universe. It is impossible here to go into the details of the subject, and we have aimed only to state the present attitude and tendency of psychological inquiry, which is briefly this: Our feelings and volitions, aptitudes and acquisitions, are elements of mind having their corporeal side which it is both indispensable and possible to understand—great progress having been recently made in the investigation. Much in the relations of the cerebral structures to mental action is still profoundly obscure, but much is also already known which is of the highest service for useful guidance. Metaphysics has been hitherto proverbially barren, because it has insisted upon considering mind as an isolated abstraction; while modern psychology, by regarding the whole nature as a unity, promises, on the other hand, to be eminently productive of practical results.

British Association for the Advancement of Science commenced its forty-third session September 17th, in the town of Bradford. Dr. Carpenter resigned the presidency, and, as the health of Dr. J. P. Joule, his successor-elect, did not allow him to assume the duties of the chair, it was taken by Prof. Williamson, the eminent English chemist, who devoted his inaugural address to the discussion of his own department of science. After a handsome tribute to the memory of Liebig, Prof. Williamson entered into an exposition of the present conditions of chemical science, the directions of its greatest activity, the present state of chemical theory, and the general relations of scientific education to the advancement of knowledge. The whole paper is able, but it did not arrive in time for publication in the present number of the.

The chairman of the biological section was Prof. Allman, the distinguished zoologist of the Edinburgh University, and his address, upon taking the chair, seems to us a very able and instructive scientific discussion. But what is the British Association for the Advancement of Science about, in putting at the head of its biological branch a man who favors Darwinian notions, and is consequently a sham scientist? Do they not know that from the Yankee Vatican has gone forth a bull which excommunicates them and their seed to the end of time? In his lively address before the Free Religious Association, in Boston, last May, Colonel Higginson apologized for the extent of theological disagreement by