Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/428

412 thickness rests upon the bed, over which it moves with a pressure of more than 260,000 pounds for each square foot of surface, and many such as this covered the old glacier-regions through an unmeasured period of time. In their movement lakes were excavated, water-courses changed, and landscapes cast into innumerable forms of beauty. We utilize the results. Our forests and our harvests grow upon soil ground in the glacial mill, and we build our cities on mounds of glacial rubbish. Nor can we fail to realize that here, as elsewhere in the phenomena of Nature, there is a ministration to our conscious life, as there is an appeal to our sense of beauty, and that, whatever form it may assume, whether of the feathery spangle which rocks upon the waves of air, or the profound glacier that buries a continent, ice is Winter's benefaction.

 

REAT as were the services of Mr. John Stuart Mill to Philosophy in general, and Psychology in particular, we cannot ascribe to him any notable advance in psychological doctrine, or in the conception or application of psychological method. In doctrine, his chief contributions were the restatement, in a form adapted to the changed conditions of the controversies, of Berkeley's theory of material, and Hume's theory of mental, existence. But neither the psychological theory of mind nor the psychological theory of matter contains any new principle, or exhibits any new way of applying old principles. In constructive method, he could get no further than Brown's half-century-old "chemistry of the mind," and though he earnestly recommended the St. Andrew's students to make the acquaintance of Physiology, as supplying to Psychology the principles of predisposition, habit, and development, he never made the smallest use of these principles himself, and had not a single word to say in favor of Mr. Spencer's use of them. That he still traded on the old conceptions is evident from his metaphors: the "thread of consciousness" is a decided advance on Locke's "gang of ideas," but he shies at Prof. Masson's "organic union" of states, and prefers to connect them by an "inexplicable tie." Mill, in fact, was above all things a logician, and whatever he accomplished in the sciences was in virtue of his clear perception of the extent of a principle, the limitations to which it was subject, and the conditions under which it could be most fruitfully 