philosophy of the schools, the interrogation of nature by experiment was going on in many places; and the superstitious people that believe in the direct interference of spirits or of gods, still adopt such means of self-protection as a simple experience of nature teaches. Man does not consciously determine his method and then enter upon it; he enters blindly upon it, and at a certain stage awakes to consciousness. In the onward flowing stream of nature's organic evolution, life first becomes selfconscious in man: in the slumbering mental development of mankind, it is the genius who at due time awakens to active consciousness the sleeping century. It would indeed go hard with mankind if they must act wittingly before they acted at all.

Two facts come out very distinctly from a candid observation of the state of thought at the present day. One of these is the little favour in which metaphysics is held, and the very general conviction that there is no profit in it: the consequence of which firmly fixed belief is, that it is cultivated as a science only by those whose particular business it is to do so, who are engaged not in action, wherein the true balance of life is maintained, but in dreaming in professorial chairs; or if by any others, by the ambitious youth who goes through an attack of metaphysics as a child goes through an attack of measles, getting haply an immunity from a similar affection for the rest of his life; or lastly, by the untrained and immature intellects of those metaphysical dabblers who continue youths for life. A second fact, which has scarcely yet been sufficiently weighed, is the extreme favour in which biography is held at the present time, and the large development which it is receiving.

Let us look first at the import of biography. As the business of a man in the world is action of some kind, and as his action undoubtedly results from the relations between him and his surroundings, it is plain that biography, which estimates both the individual and his circumstances, and displays their reactions, can alone give an adequate account of the man. What was the mortal's force of character, what was the force of circumstances, how he struggled with them, and how he was affected by them,-what was the life-product under the particular conditions of its evolution:-these are the questions which a good biography aspires to answer. It regards men as concrete beings, acknow

ledges the differences between them in characters and capabilities, recognises the helpful or baneful influence of surroundings, and patiently unfolds the texture of life as the inevitable result of the elements out of which, and the conditions under which, it has been worked. It is, in fact, the application of positive science to human life, and the necessary consequence of the progress of the inductive philosophy. No marvel, then, that biography forms so large a part of the literature of the day, and that novels, its more or less faithful mirrors, are in so great request. The instincts of mankind are here, as heretofore, in advance of systematic knowledge or method.

On the other hand, the metaphysician deals with man as an abstract or ideal being, postulates him as a certain constant quantity, and thereupon confidently enunciates empty propositions. The consequence is, that metaphysics has never made any advance, but has only appeared in new garb; nor can it in truth advance, unless some great addition is made to the inborn power of the human mind. It surely argues no little conceit in any one to believe that what Plato and Descartes have not done, he, following the same method, will do.* Plato interrogated his own mind, and set forth its answers with a clearness, subtlety, and elegance of style that is unsurpassed and unsurpassable; until then the very unlikely event of a better mind than his making its appearance, his system may well remain as the adequate representative of what the metaphysical method can accomplish. Superseded by a more fruitful method, it is practically obsolete; and its rare advocate, when such an one is found, may be said, like the Aturian parrot of which Humboldt tells, to speak in the language of an extinct tribe to a people which understand him not.

But the method of interrogating self-consciousness may be employ, and is largely employed, without carrying it to a metaphysical extreme. Empirical psychology, founded on direct

"It uld be an unsound fancy and self-contra lictory, to expect that things which ha never yet been done can be done, except by means which have never yet beened."-Nor. Org. Aphorism vi.

✦ “Tre still lives, and it is a singular fact, and parrot in Maypures which cannot leaderstood, because, as the natives assert, it speaks the language of the Atures extinct tribe of Indians, whose last fuge was the rocks of the foaming caract of the Orinoco."-HUMBOLDT, Vies of Nature, i. p. 172.

consciousness as distinguished from the transcendental consciousness on which metaphysics is based, claims to give a faithful record of our different states of mind and their mutual relations, and has been extravagantly lauded, by the Scotch school, as an inductive science. Its value as a science must plainly rest upon the sufficiency and reliability of consciousness as a witness of that which takes place in the mind. Is the foundation then sufficiently secure? It may well be doubted; and for the following reasons:—

(a.) There are but few individuals who are capable of attending to the succession of phenomena in their own minds; such introspection demanding a particular cultivation, and being practised with any degree of, or pretence to, success by those only who have learned the terms, and been imbued with the theories, of the system of psychology supposed to be thereby established. And with what success?

(b.) There is no agreement between those who have acquired the power of introspection: and men of apparently equal cultivation and capacity will, with the utmost sincerity and confidence, lay down directly contradictory propositions. It is not possible to convince either opponent of error, as it might be in a matter of objective science, because he appeals to a witness whose evidence can be taken by no one but himself, and whose veracity, therefore, cannot be tested. He brings forward the factitious deliverances of his individual consciousness, but no fact which is capable of being demonstrated to another mind.

(c.) To direct consciousness inwardly to the observation of a particular state of mind is to isolate that activity for the time, to cut it off from its relations, and, therefore, to render it unnatural In order to observe its own action, it is necessary that the min pause from activity; and yet it is the train of activity that is to be observed. As long as you cannot effect the pause necessary for self-contemplation, there can be no observation of the current of activity if the pause is effected, then there can be nothing to observe. This cannot be accounted a vain and theoretical objection, for the results of introspection too surely confirm its validity: what was a question once is a question still, and instead of being resolved by introspective analysis is only fixed and fed. (5)

(d) The madman's delusion is of itself sufficient to excite profound distrust, not only in the objective truth, but in the subjective worth, of the testimony of an individual's self-consciousness. Descartes laid down the test of a true belief to be that which the mind could clearly and distinctly conceive: if there is one thing more clearly and distinctly conceived than another, it is commonly the madman's delusion. No marvel, then, that psychologists, since the time of Descartes, have held that the veracity of consciousness is to be relied upon only under certain rules, from the violation of which, Sir W. Hamilton believed, the contradictions of philosophy have arisen. On what evidence, then, do the rules rest? Either on the evidence of consciousness, whence it happens that each philosopher and each lunatic has his own rules, and no advance is made; or upon the observation and judgment of mankind, to confess which is very much like throwing self-consciousness overboard-not otherwise than as was advantageously done by positive science when the figures on the therinometer, and not the subjective feelings of heat or cold, were recognised to be the true test of the individual's temperature.

It is not merely a charge against self-consciousness that it is not reliable in that of which it does give information; but it is a provable charge against it that it does not give any account of a large and important part of our mental activity: its light reaches only to states of consciousness, not to states of mind. Its evidence, then, is not only untrustworthy save under conditions which it nowise helps us to fix, but it is of little value, because it has reference only to a small part of that for which its testimony is invoked. May we not then justly say that selfconsciousness is utterly incompetent to supply the facts for the bu king up of a truly inductive psychology? Let the following reasons further warrant the assertion :

1. It is the fundamental maxim of the inductive philosophy that observation should begin with simple instances, ascent being made gradually from them through appropriate generalizations, and that no particulars should be neglected. How does the interrogation of self-consciousness fulfil this most just demand? It is a thod which is applicable only to mind at a hih degree of devlopment, so that it perforce begins with those

most complex instances which give the least certain information; while it passes completely by mind in its lower stages of development, so that it ignores those simpler instances which give the best or securest information In this it resembles the philosopher who, while he gazed upon the stars, fell into the water; "for if," as Bacon says, "he had looked down, he might have seen the stars in the water, but, looking aloft, he could not see the water in the stars." (3) Where has the animal any place in the accepted system of psychology? or the child, the direction of whose early mental development is commonly decisive of its future destiny? To speak of induction where so many important instances are neglected, and others are selected according to caprice or the ease of convenience, is to rob the word of all definite meaning, and most mischievously to misuse it. A psychology which is truly inductive must follow the order of nature, and begin where mind begins in the animal and infant, gradually rising thence to those higher and more complex mental phenomena which the introspective philosopher discerns or thinks he discerns. Certainly it may be said, and it has been said, that inferences as to the mental phenomena of the child can be correctly formed from the phenomena of the adult mind. But it is exactly because such erroneous inferences have been made, that the mental phenomena of the child have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, and that psychology has not received the benefit of the correction which a faithful observation of them would have furnished. It was the physiologist who by a careful observation of the lower animals, "having entered firmly on the true road, and submitting his understanding to things," arrived at generalizations which were found to explain many of the mental phenomena of the child, and which have furthermore thrown so much light upon the mental life of the adult. The careful study of the genesis of mind is as necessary to a true knowledge of mental phenomena as the study of its plan of development confessedly is to an adequate conception of the bodily life.

Again, it might be thought a monstrous mistake of nature to have brought forth so many idiots and lunatics, seeing that the introspective psychologists, though making a profession of induction with their lips, take no notice whatever of the large collection of instances afforded by such unwelcome anomalies.