ments; a tree, and its branches, and stems, and foliage; a horse, and its limbs, and trunk, and head. Our mind, which had existed in the states which constituted the simple perception of these objects, begins immediately to exist in that different state which constitutes the feeling of the relation of parts to one comprehensive whole.

In these varieties of relative suggestion, some one of which, as you will find, is all that constitutes each individual judgment, even in the longest series of our ratiocination, nothing more is necessary to the suggestion or rise of the feeling of relation than the simple previous perceptions, or conceptions, between the objects of

which the relation is felt to exist. When we look at two flowers it is not necessary that we should have formed any intentional comparison. But the similitude strikes us, before any desire of discovering resemblance can have arisen. We may, indeed, resolve to trace, as far as we are able, the resemblance of particular objects, and may study them accordingly; but this very desire presupposes, in the mind, a capacity of relative suggestion, of which it avails itself; in the same manner as the intention of climbing a hill, or traversing a meadow, implies the power of muscular motion, as a part of our physical constitution.

Besides a thousand other delights and benefits, it is to the results of resemblances that we owe all classification, and, consequently, almost all that is valuable in language. That classification is founded on the relation of similarity of some sort, in the objects classed together, and could not have been formed if the mind, in addition to its primary powers of external sense, had not possessed that secondary power, by which it invests with certain relations the objects which it perceives, is most evident. All which is strictly sensitive in the mind might have been the same as now; and the perception of a sheep might have succeeded a thousand times the perception of a horse without suggesting the notion which leads us to form the general term quadruped, or animal, inclusive of both. The relation is truly no part of the object perceived by us, and classed as relative and correllative, each of which would be precisely the same in every quality which it possesses, and in every feeling which it directly excites, though the others with which it may be classed had no existence. It is from the laws of the mind which considers them that the relation is derived; not from the laws or direct qualities of the objects considered. But for our susceptibilities of those affections, or states of the mind, which constitute the feeling of similarity, all objects would have been to us, in the scholastic sense of the phrase, things singular, and all language, consequently, nothing more than the expression of individual existence. Such a language, it is very evident, would be of little service in any respect, and of no aid to the memory, which it would oppress rather than relieve. It is the use of general terms; that is, of terms founded on the feeling of resemblance, which alone gives to language its power, enabling us to condense, in a single word, the innumerable objects which, if we attempted to grasp them all individually in our conception, we should be

as little able to comprehend, as to gather all the masses of all the planets in the narrow concavity of that hand which a few particles are sufficient to fill, and which soon sinks oppressed with the weight of the few particles that fill it

That man can reason without language of any kind, and consequently without general terms, though the opposite opinion is maintained by many very eminent philosophers (not by Hobbes however, who expresses in substance the same opinion as Dr. Brown), seems not to admit of any reasonable doubt: or, if it required any proof, it would seem to be sufficiently shown by the very invention of the language which involves these general terms; and still more sensibly by the conduct of the uninstructed deaf and dumb; to which, also, the evident marks of reasoning in the other animals, of reasoning as unquestionable as the instincts that mingle with it, may be said to furnish a very striking additional argument from analogy. But it is not less certain that, without general terms, reasoning must be very imperfect, and scarcely worthy of the name, when compared with that noble power which language has rendered it. The art of definition, which is merely the art of fixing in a single word or phrase the particular circumstance of agreement of various individual objects, which, in consequence of this feeling of relation we have chosen to class together, gives us certain fixed points of reference, both for ourselves and others, without which it would be impossible for us to know the progress which we have made impossible to remember accurately the results even of a single reasoning, and to apply them, with profit, to future analysis. Nor would knowledge be vague only; it would, but for general terms, be as incommunicable as vague; for it must be remembered that such terms form almost the whole of the great medium, by which we communicate with each other.

The perception of objects, the feeling of their resemblance in certain respects, the invention of a name for these circumstances of felt resemblance: what can be more truly and readily conceivable than this process! And yet, on this process, apparently so very simple, has been founded all that controversy, as to universals, which so long distracted the schools; and which far more wonderfully (for the distraction of the schools by y a a few unintelligible words scarcely can be counted wonderful) continues still to perplex philosophers with difficulties which themselves have made, with difficulties which they could not even have made to themselves, if they had thought for a single moment of the nature of that feeling of the relation of similarity which we are now considering.

We feel, in transeribing the words of the lecturer, as if partaking in his triumph. This lecture alone, this portion of it which we have extracted, is worth all the contributions of discovery, and data, and phenomena, to the science of mind, we say not of Dr. Reid and his compeers and illustrious pupil, but of all the intellectual philosophers since the days of Hobbes, with Hartley and Hercules at their head. This alone would have proclaimed Dr. Brown worthy of moving up to the highest place of metaphy

sical dignity, and of taking his station at the right hand of the philosopher of Malmesbury. We regard the discussion of relative suggestion as one of the mightiest achievements and proudest triumphs of human reason. But we have neither time nor space to give vent to all our feelings, or to point out the grounds on which our admiration rests, or the claims of Dr. Brown not only to our applause, but to our gratitude as an intellectual benefactor of the highest order. Transcription is in itself, abstractedly considered, irksome, laborious work, and we would rather give the ideas of the lecturer in our own words were we not fearful of marring his reasoning. We must transcribe his recapitulation of the preceding lecture almost verbatim.

'Having brought to a conclusion my remarks concerning simple suggestion, I entered, in my last lecture, on the consideration of those states of mind which constitute our feelings of relation, the results of that peculiar mental tendency to which, as distinguished from the simple suggestion that furnishes the other class of our intellectual states of mind, I have given the name of relative suggestion. The relations which we are thus capable of feeling, as they rise by internal suggestion, on the mere perception or concepрtion of two or more objects, I divided, in conformity with our primary division of the objects of physical enquiry, into the relations of co-existence, and the relations of succession, according as the notion of time or change is or is not involved in them; and the former of these, the relations that are considered by us without any regard to time, I arranged in subdivisions, according to the notions which they involve, 1. Of position; 2. Resemblance or difference; 3. Of degree; 4. Of proportion; 5. Of comprehensiveness, or the relation which a whole bears to the separate parts that are included in it.

These various relations I briefly illustrated in the order in which I have now mentioned them, and showed how very simple that mental process is by which they arise; as simple, indeed, and as easily conceivable, as that by which the primary perceptions themselves arise. On some of them, however, I felt it necessary to dwell with fuller elucidation; not on account of any greater mystery in the suggestions on which they depend, but on account of that greater mystery which has been supposed to hang about them.

A great part of my lecture, accordingly, was employed in considering the relation of resem-, blance, which, by the general notions and corresponding general terms that flow from it, we found to be the source of classification and definition, and of all that is valuable in language.

'A horse, an ox, a sheep, have, in themselves, as individual beings, precisely the same qualities, whether the other be or be not considered by us at the same time. When, in looking at them, we are struck with their resemblance in certain respects, they are themselves exactly the same individuals as before; the only change which has taken place being a feeling of our own mind. And, in like manner, in the next stage of the process of verbal generalisation, when, in consequence of this feeling of relation in our own minds, we proceed to term them quadrupeds or

animals, no quality has been taken from the objects which we have ranged together under this new term, and as little has any new quality been given to them. Every thing in the objects is precisely the same as before, and acts in precisely the same manner on our senses, as when the word quadruped or animal was uninvented. The general terms are expressive of our own internal feelings of resemblance, and of nothing more; expressive of what is in us, and dependent wholly on laws of mind, not of what is in them, and directly dependent in any degree on laws of matter.

'That, in looking at a horse, an ox, a sheep, we should be struck with a feeling of their resemblance in certain respects; that to those respects in which they are felt to resemble each other we should give a name, as we give a name to each of them individually, comprehending under the general name such objects only as excite, when considered together with others, the feeling of this particular relation; all this has surely nothing very mysterious in it. It would, indeed, be more mysterious, if, perceiving the resemblance of objects that are constantly around us, we did not avail ourselves of language, as a mode of communicating to others our feeling of the resemblance, as we avail ourselves of it in the particular denomination of the individual, to inform others of that particular object of which we speak; and to express the common resemblance which we feel by any word, is to have invented already a general term, significant of the felt relation. The process is in itself sufficiently simple; and, if we had never heard of any controversies with respect to it, we probably could not have suspected, that the mere giving of a name to resemblances which all perceive, and the subsequent application of the name only where the resemblance is felt, should have been thought to have any thing in it more mysterious than the mere giving of a name to separate objects which all perceive, and the repetition of that name when the separate objects are again perceived. It assumes, however, immediately an air of mystery when we are told, that it relates to the predicables of the schools, and to all that long controversy with respect to the essence of universals, which divided not merely schoolman against schoolman, but nation against nation; when kings and emperors, who had so many other frivolous causes of warfare without the addition of this, were eager to take up arms, and besiege towns, and cover fields with wounded and dead, for the universal à parte rei. It is difficult for us to think that that could be simple which could produce so much fierce contention; and we strive to explain in our own mind, and, therefore, begin to see many wonderful, and perhaps unintelligible, or at least doubtful things, in phenomena which we never should have conceived to require explanation, if others had not labored to explain them, by clouding them with words.

'It is with many intellectual controversies as with the gymnastic exercises of the arena; the dust, which the conflict itself raises, soon darkens that air which was clear before; and the longer the conflict lasts the greater the dimness which arises from it. When the combatants are very many, and the combat very long and active, we may still, indeed, be able to see the mimickry of fight, and distinguish the victors from the vanquished; but even then we scarcely see distinctly; and all which remains when the victory at last is won, or when both parties are sufficiently weary and choked with dust, is the cloud of sand which they have raised, and perhaps some traces of the spot where each has fallen.

'That the subject of generalisation should have appeared mysterious to the schoolmen is not very surprising. But I must confess that there is nothing in the history of our science which appears so wonderful as that any difficulty (at least any difficulty greater than every phenomenon of every kind involves) should now be conceived to attach to this very simple process; and especially that philosophers should be so nearly unanimous in an opinion on the subject, which though directly opposed to the prevalent error in the ancient schools is not the less itself an

error.

In the view which is taken of the process of generalisation (as of every other process) there may be error in two ways; either by adding to the process what forms no part, or by omitting what does truly form a part of it. Thus, if we were to say, that, between the perception of a horse and sheep, and the feeling of their resemblance in a certain respect, there intervenes the presence of some external independent substance; some universal form or species of a quadruped, distinct from our conceiving mind, which acting on the mind, or being present with it, produces the notion of a quadruped, in the same way as the presence of the external horse or sheep produced the perception of these individually; we should err, in the former of these ways, by introducing into the process something of which we have no reason to suppose the existence, and which is not merely unnecessary, but would involve the process in innumerable perplexities and apparent inconsistencies, if it did exist. This redundance would be one. species of error; but it would not less be an error (though an error of an opposite kind), were we to suppose that any part of the process does not take place; that, for example, there is no relative suggestion, no rise in the mind of an intervening general notion of resemblance, before the invention and employment of the general term, but the mere perception of a multitude of objects, in the first place; and then, as if in instant succession, without any other intervening mental state whatever, the general names under which whole multitudes are classed.

'I have instanced these errors of supposed excess and deficiency, in the statement of the process, without alluding to any sects which have maintained them. But the two opposite errors which I have supposed are the very errors involved in the opinions of the realists and nominalists; the great combatants in that most disputatious of controversies, to which I have before alluded; a controversy which in the strong language of John of Salisbury, even at that early period, of which alone he could speak, had already employed fruitlessly more time and thought than the whole race of the Cæsars had found

necessary for acquiring and exercising the sove reignty of the world.

'Realism, which descended from Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as the orthodox inheritance in metaphysics of the schoolmen, is now universally admitted to be glaringly absurd: it has not been so hitherto, however, with Nominalism, which was espoused first by Roscelinus and after him by Abelard, Luther, Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, Dr. Campbell, and almost every philosopher of any note. Mr. Locke and Dr. Reid may be said to have had respectively some intermediate dark or confused notion of their own. The noted abstract or general triangle of the former has long been a subject of merriment. One of the most prominent and plausible nominalists is Mr. Horne Tooke, who holding that there is nothing general but terms, and that it is as absurd to speak of a complex idea as to call a constellation a complex star, was to accomplish wonderful logical things by his wonder-working etymology. In confidence or pretension he was almost a match for Kant the critic of pure reason. But after running his etymological race after the Northern lights, as the only infallible guides in the conduct of the understanding, he left poor human reason in the same general darkness and error in which he found it as an object of his benevolent regard or tender compassion. He did something it is true by etymology for the better understanding of language as an instrument of reasoning and a medium of thought; and he would have done more but for his blind credulity and over-weening affection towards the northern origin.' We wish Dr. Brown had studied and understood the nature and office of language as much as he did, or rather as much as his great metaphysical predecessor and prototype in most other respects, the philosopher of Malmesbury. In that case what would he not have effected? But we are unwise or unreasonable perhaps in wishing that he had been any thing but precisely what he was. But we must again permit him to address the reader and dispose of nominalism.

'Even in professing to exclude the general notion of resemblance, the nominalist unconsciously proceeds on it; and no stronger proof can be imagined of the imperfectedness of the view which his system gives of our generalisations than the constant necessity under which we perceive him to labor of assuming, at every stage of his argument, the existence of those very notions, or feelings of relative suggestion against which his argument is directed. The general term, we are told, is significant of all objects of a certain kind, or a particular idea is made to represent various other ideas of the same sort; as if the very doctrine did not necessarily exclude all notion of a kind or sort, independent of the application of the term itself. An idea,' says Berkeley, 'which considered in itself is particular, becomes general, by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort; and he instances this in the case of any particular length, an inch, for example; which, to a geometer, he says, becomes general, as it represents all particular lines whatsoever; so that what is demonstrated of it, is demonstrated of all lines, or, in other words, of a line in general. It is truly inconceivable that he should not have discovered, in this very statement, that he had taken for granted the existence of general notions, the very states of mind which he denied; since, without these, there can be no meaning in the restriction of any sign to 'ideas of the same sort.'

But it is not necessary to accompany Dr. Brown farther in the process of a refutation of such mysticism and unmeaningness or absurdity as that of Berkeley and others in defence or definition of nominalism. The following is the conclusion of the whole.

'In the case of nominalism, as in many other cases, I have no doubt, notwithstanding the apparent extravagance of the paradox, that it is because the doctrine of the nominalists is very contrary to our feelings, we do not immediately discover it to be so. If it were nearer the truth we should probably discover the error which it involves much more readily. The error escapes us because our general terms convey so immediately to our mind that common relation which they denote, that we supply of ourselves, what is wanting in the process as described by the nominalist; the feelings of the circumstances of resemblance, specific or generic, that are to guide us in the application as they led us to the invention of our terms. We know what it is which he means, when he speaks of particular terms, or particular ideas, that became more generally significant by standing for ideas of the same sort, or the same order, or species, or genus, or kind; and we therefore make for him, by the natural spontaneous suggestions of our own mind, the extension and limitation which would be impossible on his own system. But for such an illusion it seems scarcely impossible to understand how so many, of the first names of which our science can boast, should be found among the defenders of an opinion which makes reasoning nothing more than a mere play upon words, or, at best, reduces very nearly to the same level the profoundest ratiocinations of intellectual, or physical, or mathematical philosophy, and the technical labors of the grammarian or the lexicographer.'

The system of the nominalists then, though more simple than that of the realists, is not, any more than it, a faithful statement of the process of generalisation. It is true as it rejects the existence of any universal form or species, distinct from our mere feeling of general resemblance. But it is false as it rejects the general relative feeling itself, which every general term denotes, and without which, to direct us in the extension and limitation of our terms, we should be in danger of giving the name of triangle as much to a square or circle, as to any three-sided figure. We perceive objects, we have a feeling or general notion of their resemblance, we express this general notion by a general term. Such is the process of which we are conscious; and no system which omits any part of the process can be a faithful picture of our consciousness.

We have alluded above to Mr. Locke's notable general triangle. As it is calculated to set his metaphysical mastery in a striking light,

when he ventured to quit his guides and attempt originality, we quote the passage which may be found by the reader in turning to Book IV. chap. vii. sect. 9, of the Essay concerning Human Understanding: - Does it not require some pains and skill,' says Mr. Locke, 'to form the general idea of a triangle (which is yet none of the most abstract, comprehensive, and difficult)? for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once. In effect it is something imperfect that cannot exist; an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together.'

Mr. Locke

This is surely worthy of being preserved as a precious metaphysical relic of Mr. Locke, and in confirmation of the old testimony of Cicero respecting nothing being too absurd to be found in the writings of philosophers. may be designated a conceptualist, to discriminate him (as intermediate) from the realists on the one extreme, and the nominalists on the other; but, in reference to either, his idea was confusion worse confounded. Dr. Brown is at some pains to show (as Mr. Stewart is indefatigable in showing, in reference to his making reflection a distinct origin of ideas), that Mr. Locke meant well in this matter: and none can have a higher opinion of his good intentions than we have. He was truly, in the very highest sense of the expression, a well-meaning man. As in all practical and less abstract concerns sensible and judicious, as a truly good man, as the friend of human improvement and happiness, as the advocate, and in some sense a father, of civil and religious liberty, or, at least, of just notions concerning them, we revere and love his memory. But we cannot prostrate our understanding to him as a metaphysical object of worship, or sincerely profess to admire him as possessed of extraordinary intellectual acuteness, originality, depth, or comprehension.

As an ulterior step, in the discussion of relative suggestion, Dr. Brown proceeds in the forty-eighth lecture to give an analysis of the process of reasoning; and we shall endeavour to extract from it what seems most essentially important.

On that class of our relative suggestions which involves the feeling of the relation of the parts comprehended to the comprehending whole, it will be necessary to bestow some more illustration, that you may understand clearly the nature of the process of reasoning; that most important of all our mental processes, which logicians and metaphysicians have contrived to render so obscure, but which is in itself nothing more than a series of felt relations of this particular class in the instances of which I selected before, of a house and its apartments; a tree and its stems and foliage; a horse and its head and limbs and trunk. The relation which I have termed the relation of comprehension, or comprehensiveness, is so very obvious, that a mere allusion to it is sufficient, without any commentary.

When I think of cases in which the relation is of a substance to parts that are themselves substances, as when I say that a room is a part of a house, or that a tree has branches, it is quite evident that in these very simple propositions I merely state the relation of parts to a comprehending whole. But is the statement at all different when I speak, in the common forms of a proposition, of the qualities of objects; when I say, for example, that snow is white, man is capable of reasoning, the wisest of mankind is fallible? do I not merely state one of the many qualities, comprehended in that totality of qualities, which constitute the subject as known to me? I do not indeed divide a mass into its integral parts, but I divide a complex notion into its parts, or at least separate from that complexity a quantity which I feel to belong, and state to belong, to that complex notion from which I have detached it. It is as it were a little analysis and synthesis. I decompose, and, expressing to others the mental decomposition which I have made, I combine again the separated elements of my thought, not indeed in the same manner (for the analytic process is as different as matter is from mind), but with the same feeling of agreement or identity that rises in the mind of a chemist when he has reduced to one mass the very elements into which he had transmuted the mass, by some one of the analyses of his wonderful art.'

What then is reasoning (which is nothing more than a number of propositions consecutive in a certain order) but a continued series of analytical operations of this kind, developing the elements of our thought? In every proposition that which is affirmed is a part of that of which it is affirmed, and the proposition, however technical its language may be, expresses only the single feeling of this relation.

Whatever be the species of reasoning, however, it is necessary that the proportions which form the reasoning should follow each other in a certain order; for without this order, though each proposition might involve some little analysis, and consequently some little accession of knowledge, the knowledge thus acquired must be very limited. There could be no deduction of remote conclusions, by which the primary object of a distant proposition might be shown, through a long succession of analyses, to have properties which required all these various evolutions before they could themselves be evolved to view. In the proportional reasonings of geometry, we know well that the omission of a single proposition, or even a change of its place, might render apparently false, and almost inconceivable by us, a conclusion which, but for such omission or change of place of a few words of the demonstration, we should have adopted instantly, with a feeling of the absolute impossibility of resisting its evidence.

To constitute reasoning it is necessary that there should be some mutual relation of the subjects and predicates of the different propositions. The order of the different propositions is so arranged, as to present to us this mutual relation of the successive subjects and predicates; it is therefore of the utmost importance to our consecutive analyses, in the reasonings that are strictly analytic, and to our consecutive measurements in the reasonings which are proportional. On what does this order depend?

The common opinion on the subject makes this order a very easy matter. We have a certain sagacity, it is said, by which we find out the intervening propositions, and they are arranged in the proper order because we have discovered them to be suitable for our measurement, and put them in their proper places. Those intervening ideas which serve to show the agreement of any two others,' says Locke, are called proofs. A quickness in the mind to find out these intermediate ideas (that shall discover the agreement or disagreement of any other), and to apply them rightly, is, I suppose, that which is called sagacity.' And reason itself he elsewhere defines to be the faculty which finds out these means and rightly applies them. We need not quote the common expressions to the same purport which are to be found in other writers.

The sagacity of which Locke and other writers speak, may (since it is nothing more than a form of our simple suggestion itself) be reduced to that peculiar tendency of the suggesting principle, varying in different minds, of which we have before treated, when considering the secondary laws of suggestion in their relation to original genius. The same objects do not suggest to all the same objects even where past observation and experience may. have been the same, because the peculiar suggestions of the objects, the relations of which are afterwards felt, depend in a great measure also on tendencies modified by long habit, and therefore varying in different individuals as these habits may have been different. To some minds (the common minds which in the great multitudes of our race think what others have thought, and do what others have done) the conceptions which form their trains of memory, that scarcely can be called trains of reflection, rise, as we have seen, according to the relation of mere contiguity, or former proximity in time, of the related images. The conceptions of minds of a higher order rise in almost infinite variety, because they rise according to a relation which does not depend on former co-existence of the very images themselves, but is itself almost infinitely various.

The differences of opinion in mankind, far from being wonderful, are such as must have arisen though there had been no other cause of difference than the variety of the conceptions, which by the simple laws of suggestion, occur in the various trains of thought of individuals, diversifying of course the order of propositions in their reasonings, and consequently the relation which the conclusion involves. The objects compared have, at every stage of the argument, been different; and the results of the comparison of different objects, therefore, cannot well be expected to be the same.

Having resolved the whole process of reasoning into simple suggestion, as so fully and clearly explained by him, Dr. Brown adverts to the syllogistic art, which so long reigned triumphant in the schools, and which still lingers in the fond embrace of a certain description of logical professors. We have already given the substance of his statement at the conclusion of the article Logic, to