plainly confounds the two inverse kinds of "dependence,"-logical, in the order of knowing,-real, in the order of being;the causa cognoscendi and the causa essendi. The knowledge of light is dependent on vision, its effect; the being of vision is dependent on light, its cause: whose relative "independent existence" is so far from being "contradicted," that it is directly implied, by its dependent logical position :-the two things being indeed but one and the same relation read from opposite ends. Our author, it is true, affirms that "we cannot know light, but as in our minds." But how so? Because, we presume, it is known by seeing it, and that is an act of the mind. Yes, certainly; the seeing :-but, on that very account, not the thing seen for the cognitive act, instead of implying coalescence and identity, is conditional on separation and mutual exclusion, of the knower and the known, and can reveal neither except as over against the other. Were it otherwise,-were all that we know to be on that account seated at the cognitive point,-knowledge and being must coalesce, and could never look each other in the face: nothing could be known as existing and nothing could exist as known. The intellectual power itself would constitute a disqualification for intelligence. If there really were external objects, and a faculty in us for their apprehension, Mr. Bain's argument would still apply: if where they are known, there we must presume them to be, our cognisance of them as external ought to be treated as false; its truth would be a proper ground for disbelieving it; and the perfect knowledge of a thing would be its absolute disproof.

A psychology which allows us cognisance only of the thread of our own feelings is obliged to account for the objective look and substantive pretensions of some portions of our knowledge, by making up aggregates of feelings, and assuming that their chemical union gives them the fallacious aspect of being more than feelings, of being elsewhere than in ourselves,—of being one instead of many. The grand instrument of this metamorphosis, we need hardly say, is the Association of Ideas,—or, more properly, of actions and mental states; among which, either contiguous terms, or resembling terms, have a tendency to revive each other. This is a veritable and universally recognised psychological law: and to the great merits of his school in vindicating its importance and extending its application Mr. Bain has made large additions in his copious and elaborate exposition. Without the originality of Hartley (whose work, after every deduction, still stands in the highest rank of psychological literature), and without the severe precision of James Mill, our author opens a fuller storehouse of illustration, and spreads out its contents in a more telling and agreeable way. He is master

of all the dexterities of this law, and prepared to show the utmost that can be done with it. Whether it is not overtasked is perhaps a natural question with even the most trustful reader. Its requirements are so modest, and its achievements so grand, that it is apt to be suspected for the very scale of its apparent victories. Given the rudiments of any brute,'-so it seems to state its problem, to construct the perfection of any angel.' The five senses and ganglionic spontaneities are briskly stretched upon the Jacquard-loom: the cards, perforated according to theory, are hung upon the beam: and after a few chapters of cheerful weaving, the divine form is finished off; and you have the satisfaction not only of admiring it, but of knowing exactly what its reason, love, and goodness are made of, and how put together. The doctrine, appealing as it does chiefly to the earliest experience, and making rapid use of the years of infancy, rests, to a dangerous extent, on a conjectural psychology. It has already got over all its difficulties before the age when reflection can put it to the test: and when called in question by the mature and practised self-consciousness, glibly answers that it is too late in the day to bring up any inner evidence against it; that its wonders are all wrought within us, and can no longer be unravelled; that we have been so transformed by it as not to know ourselves, and to be decipherable only by its light; that what we take to be the simplest mental states it knows to be superlatively complex ;-what, the primary truths of reason, to be the ultimate tricks of language;-what, the native insight of conscience, to be the artificial imposition of social opinion. It is always difficult, for want of recognised criteria, to criticise hypothetical history; as, for want of common substance, to fight a duel with a ghost. Being, however, to no small extent, at one with this doctrine, we may perhaps hope to explain a scruple which checks our complete assent to it. For the sake of distinctness we limit ourselves to a single point.

All the language of the doctrine is framed on the supposition that, a number of elements being given, and laid detached before the mind, it cements them together in groups and trains, in ever-increasing complexity. The mental history is, in this view, a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words, "Association," "Suggestion," "Cohesion," "Fusion," "Indissoluble Connection," all express the change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation of the process therefore requires two things;-a true enumeration of the primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of combination: just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of the simple elements, and then with the principles of their synthesis. Now the latter of these two conditions we find satis

fied by the Association psychologists: but not the former. They are not agreed upon their catalogue of elements, or the marks by which they may know the simple from the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed: that which is called one impression by Hartley is treated as half-a-dozen or more by Mill and the tendency of the modern teachers on this point is to recede more and more from the better chosen track of their master. Hartley, for example, regarded the whole present effect upon us of any single object,-say, an orange,—as a single sensation; and the whole vestige it left behind, as a single "idea of sensation." His modern disciples, on the other hand, consider this same effect as an aggregate from a plurality of sensations, and the ideal trace it leaves as highly compound. The "idea of an object," instead of being an elementary startingpoint with them, is one of the elaborate results of repetition and experience; and is continually adduced as remarkably illustrating the fusing power of habitual association. Thus James Mill observes:

"It is to this great law of association that we trace the formation of our ideas of what we call external objects; that is, the ideas of a certain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they coalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity. Hence, what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a horse, the idea of a man. In using the names, tree, horse, man, the names of what I call objects, I am referring, and can be referring, only to my own sensations; in fact, therefore, only naming a certain number of sensations, regarded as in a particular state of combination; that is, concomitance. Particular sensations of sight, of touch, of the muscles, are the sensations to the ideas of which, colour, extension, roughness, hardness, smoothness, taste, smell, so coalescing as to appear one idea, I give the name, idea of a tree."

To precisely the same effect Mr. Bain remarks:

"External objects usually affect us through a plurality of senses. The pebble on the seashore is pictured on the eye as form and colour. We take it up in the hand and repeat the impression of form, with the additional feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a characteristic sound. To preserve the impression of an object of this kind, there must be an association of all these different effects. Such association, when matured and firm, is our idea, our intellectual grasp of the pebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a rose, we have the same effects of form to the eye and hand, colour and touch, with the new effects of odour and taste. A certain time is requisite for the coherence of all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to give us for all purposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully acquired, any one of the characteristic impressions will revive the others; Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 71.

M M

the odour, the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk,-each of these by itself will hoist the entire impression into the view." (The Senses and the Intellect, p. 411.)

Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge begin with plurality of impression and arrive at unity, we take to be a complete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think, was perfectly right in taking no notice of the number of inlets through which an object delivers its effect upon us, and, in spite of this circumstance, treating the effect as one. Had he explicitly drawn out the principle which implicitly guided him, it would have assumed perhaps something like this form: That each state of consciousness, whether awakened through more or fewer channels, is, during its continuance, originally simple; and can resolve itself only by change of equilibrium.' No psychological law appears to have higher evidence than this; and, little as the range of its consequences has been perceived, there are probably few who would dispute it when stated in a general form. Were it not true, the feeling of each moment, determined as it is by innumerable conditions in our organism, not one of which could change and leave our state the same, would seem to us, or must once have seemed, infinitely intricate. But the constancies of our system, however numerous, never disclose themselves till they break up; the functional sensibilities of the organic life first report their character when they go wrong; the muscles, blended in a state of rest, detach themselves by the permutations of motion, and acquire, as in learning the use of a keyed instrument, more and more delicate discriminations of feeling and action; and if the special senses less obviously converge upon one psychologic point, it is only because their relations are perpetually shifting inter se, and disappointing our experiments of the requisite statical conditions. But even now, after life has read us so many analytic lessons, in proportion as we can fix the attitude of our scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our impressions retreats, and we lapse into an undivided consciousness; losing, for instance, the separate notice of any uniform hum in the ear, or light in the eye, or weight of clothes on the body, though not one of them is inoperative on the complexion of our feeling. This law, once granted, must be carried far beyond Hartley's point. Not only must each object present itself to us integrally before it shells off into its qualities, but the whole scene around us must disengage for us object after object from its still background by emergence and change; and even our self-detachment from the world overagainst us must wait for the start of collision between the force we issue and that which we receive. To confine ourselves to

In

the simplest case: when a red ivory-ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, and the colour, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg: and this new difference will bring the form into notice from its previous slumber. And thus, that which began by being simply an object, cut out from the surrounding scene, becomes for us first a red object, and then a red round object; and so on. Instead, therefore, of the qualities, as separately given, subscribing together and adding themselves up to present us with the object as their aggregate, the object is beforehand with them, and from its integrity delivers them out to our knowledge, one by one. this disintegration, the primary nucleus never loses its substantive character or name; whilst the difference which it throws off appears as a mere attribute, expressed by an adjective. Hence it is that we are compelled to think of the object as having, not as being, its qualities; and can never heartily admit the belief of any loose lot of attributes really fusing themselves into a thing. The unity of the original whole is not felt to go to pieces and be resolved into the properties which it successively gives off; it retains a residuary existence, which constitutes it a substance, as against the emerging quality, which is only its phenomenal predicate. Were it not for this perpetual process of differentiation of self from the world, of object from its scene, of attribute from object, no step of Abstraction could be taken; no qualities could fall under our notice; and had we ten thousand senses, they would all converge and meet in but one consciousness. But if this be so, it is an utter falsification of the order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves into aggregates, and so composing for us the objects of which we think; and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the field of synchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experience proceeds and intellect is trained, not by Association, but by Dissociation, not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by the opening out of one into many; and a true psychological history must expound itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms. Precisely those ideas, -of Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space,-which this system treats as infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent elements, are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whose stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left undisturbed. The same inversion of the real mental order has exercised, we think, an injurious