Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/146

92 Extravagant and hopeless as these preliminary steps must now appear, they had nevertheless an obvious tendency to direct the attention of the author, in a singular degree, to the phenomena of thought; and to train him to those habits of abstraction from external objects, which, to the bulk of mankind, are next to impossible. In this way, he was led to perceive, with the evidence of consciousness, that the attributes of Mind were still more clearly and distinctly knowable than those of Matter; and that, in studying the former, so far from attempting to explain them by analogies borrowed from the latter, our chief aim ought to be, to banish as much as possible from the fancy every analogy, and even every analogical expression, which, by inviting the attention abroad, might divert it from its proper business at home. In one word, that the only right method of philosophising on this subject was comprised in the old stoical precept (understood in a sense somewhat different from that originally annexed to it) . A just conception of this rule, and a steady adherence to its spirit, constitutes the ground-work of what is properly called the Experimental Philosophy of the Human Mind. It is thus that all our facts relating to Mind must be ascertained; and it is only upon facts thus attested by our own consciousness, that any just theory of Mind can be reared.

Agreeably to these views, Descartes, was, I think, the first who clearly saw, that our idea of Mind is not direct but relative;—relative to the various operations of which we are conscious. What am I? he asks, in his second Meditation: A thinking being,—that is, a being doubting, knowing, affirming, denying, consenting, refusing, susceptible of pleasure and of pain. Of all these things I might have had complete experience, without any previous acquaintance with the qualities and laws of matter; and therefore it is impossible that the study of matter can avail me aught in the study of myself. This, accordingly, Descartes laid down as a first principle; that nothing comprehensible by the imagination can be at all subservient to the knowledge of Mind; and that the sensible images involved in all our common forms of speaking concerning its operations, are to be guarded against with the most anxious care, as tending to confound, in our apprehensions, two classes of phenomena, which it is of the last importance to distinguish accurately from each other.