Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/429

Rh. His services to psychological method were of this order, and therefore belong rather to the logic of science than to the history of Psychology. But, as his luminous exposition of the logical status of the "laws of mind" had an unquestionable influence on the most systematic application of these laws yet made, in the comprehensive work of Prof. Bain, it will be proper to inquire whether this advance too had its antecedents in the physical sciences.

Mill's logic of psychology is characteristic. Like all his doctrines, it has a positive and an hypothetical part—the hypothetical admitting almost all that his opponents of every school would assert, and the positive so stated as if those admissions had not been made. The positive aspect of it may be embodied in three propositions. Psychology is a science, because the facts of mind present certain uniformities of succession, which we call laws. It is an independent science, because its laws are ultimate, and cannot be deduced from the physiological laws of our nervous organization. Finally, this science has certain limits, which are stated, however, with a vacillation and obscurity very far from usual with so clear and resolute a thinker, but which appear to be: that sensations of one sense cannot be resolved into those of another; that "the other constituents of the mind, its beliefs, its abstruser conceptions, its sentiments, emotions, and volitions," have probably not been generated from simple ideas of sensation; and that, even if this can be proved, "we should not be the more enabled to resolve the laws of the more complex feelings into those of the simpler ones." In the hypothetical part (which has been much more strongly expressed in the later editions of the "Logic," though without any corresponding alteration of the positive part), Mill is quite prepared to admit that "the laws of mind may be derivative laws resulting from laws of animal life, and that their truth, therefore, may ultimately depend on physical conditions." But the probability of this genesis being shown, he apparently regards as so remote that it is not worth while to take the antecedent physical conditions into account except as disturbing agencies. He refuses to see that if the evolution of the higher forms of life from the lower can be made out, we do not say as an induction, but even as a good working hypothesis, the foundations of Psychology will be subverted, and it will be changed from what we may call a statical into a dynamical science.

Mill belonged, less by age than by precocious mental development, to a generation which found in him its perfect scientific, and in Mr. Carlyle its most consummate literary, expression. In literature, it turned with reverted eyes to an ever-receding golden age, and wrote histories; in science, the impulse was rather to widen, clear, and connect the old paths, than to strike out in new directions to get round obstacles, than to tunnel them. "Reaction" is so ready a spell to