Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/438

422 arise, and, if mind is merely a higher manifestation of life, they must be interpretable as life was interpreted.

Intelligence in general is differenced from life in general by the fact that the order of changes of which it consists is successive. The science of intelligence having thus for its subject-matter a continued series of changes, it is the business of Psychology to determine the law of their succession. Bringing up the "law of correspondences" left in the rear, it is found that one mental state tends to follow another with a strength proportionate to the intimate union between the external things they represent. Here is a "law of association" of Hegelian depth, cutting down to the adamantine pillars of the universe, and compared with which the so-called laws of association are mere empiricism. The law is also of Hegelian content—rivaling that cocoon das Werden, and out of it shall be woven all the phenomena of unfolding intelligence. Reflex action we have already seen Mr. Bain incorporate in Psychology; Mr. Spencer shows how it necessarily arises out of developing life. Instinct, too, Mr. Bain prefixes to his analysis of ideas; Mr. Spencer evolves it out of reflex action. With the increasing complexity of experience Memory arises, and Mill's "insoluble problem" is solved. The chapter on Reason is, perhaps, the finest synthetic exposition in the literature of Psychology. Reason, like Memory, is shown to be developed by an insensible transition out of instinct; and Locke is reconciled with Kant by the intervention of that theory of the secular transmission of mental acquisitions which has become so familiar that it is now difficult to appreciate its daring originality. Feeling, like Reason, arises out of instinct; and emotions of the greatest complexity, power, and abstractness, are formed out of the simple aggregation of large groups of emotional states into still larger groups through endless past ages. Thus out of the feeble beginnings of life have been woven all the manifestations of mind, up to the highest abstractions of a Hegel and the infinitely complex and voluminous emotions of a Beethoven. Well may a French writer say: "Si on la rapproche par la pensée des tentatives de Locke et de Condillac sur ce sujet, la genèse sensualiste paraîtra d'une simplicité enfantine."

Hitherto the psychologist, proceeding objectively, has made no use of consciousness; and it is now necessary, in order to justify the findings of the synthetic method, to examine consciousness in the only possible way—by analysis. Setting out with the highest conceivable display of mind, compound quantitative reasoning, he tracks all the mental phenomena down to that which is only a change in consciousness, the establishment of the relation of sequence, and proves that the genesis of intelligence has advanced in the same way as was shown in the synthesis—by the establishment and consolidation of relations of increasing complexity. Thus throughout all the phenomena of