losopher of the intellect will stand ready to arrange these freshly created materials in his ever growing system. Thus, the Science of the Mind, though susceptible of perpetual advances, must necessarily be the last to arrive at perfection. Its elements partly consist of the results of all the other sciences. It is waiting to see what man can do and suffer, for its own business is to record and classify it. We cannot conceive of the final step of its march on earth; its present incipient existence here thus constituting a new proof of a future state of being. Like the leading and essential virtue of Christianity, it never faileth, not even when prophecies fail, and tongues cease, and subordinate systems of knowledge vanish away. It is high time to cease confounding the science of the mind with Metaphysics. This word, by common use, has now imperceptibly acquired a new signification, no longer to be found in the dictionaries, and no longer expressive of a distinct science. We will try to explain and fix its present general acceptation. Metaphysics is that which ascribes imaginary and plausible causes to existing appearances, and speculates upon the nature of what is hidden and unknown. We would distinguish it from Philosophy, inasmuch as philosophy ascertains the causes of phenomena, and learns from experience the properties of things. Metaphysics will be found to enter more or less into every department of learning. When Newton discovered and applied the law of gravitation, he was, strictly speaking, the philosopher. When he ascribed that gravitation to the influence of a subtle, etherial fluid, pervading all bodies, (though the theory almost prophetically accorded with some things, which we now know respecting electricity,) he was only the metaphysician. When Haüy unfolded the mechanical composition of crystals, and even demonstrated the necessary forms of their ultimate particles, he acted the part of a philosopher; but in attempting to account for the transmission of light through them, one might theorise ever so plausibly, and still be nothing more than a metaphysician. When Locke divided our ideas into those of sensation and reflection, although his division might have been incomplete or even redundant, yet, being a classification of known phenomena, it was perfectly philosophical. But when he accounted for our sensations of different colors by the VOL. XIX.-NO. 44. 2 emission of differently shaped atoms from the surfaces of bodies, he was metaphysical. When the Edinburgh Review traced the influence of French literature upon the poetry of the English Augustan age, it was convincingly philosophical; but, at another time, in accounting for the pleasure derived from Mr Campbell's poetry, it worked itself up into a fit of beautiful metaphysical frenzy. Philosophy reasons rightly from right data; the reasoning, or the data, or both, of metaphysics, may be either right or wrong. A spice of metaphysics in a man's mind is a very good thing; in some writers a slight mixture of it has made many an author popular. It flatters the reader's own consciousness of being profound, and it stimulates his imagination to ascribe uncommon resources to the writer. Most men of genius are not without the metaphysical characteristic. It is the pioneer to discoveries of unknown relations among things. To improve any science, or to break into any original track of thought, one must have some tendency towards this quality. All the great chemists we ever heard of have been endued with the metaphysical impetus. It is conjecture, and fancy, and refined curiosity, which prompt them to experiment, and it is not until they confirm by fact even the most sagacious of their conjectures, that they are honored with the name of philosophers. The science of electricity, if we may strictly call it science, is at this moment half philosophy and half metaphysics. The science of the mind was once almost entirely metaphysics, and rightly bore that name, which it still erroneously bears, though very much purified from the admixture. Aristotle, however, mingled a good deal of philosophy with the science. His followers, and the schools of later date, made it nearly all metaphysics again. Des Cartes and Malebranche began to restore it to its proper balance, but were still too inveterate metaphysicians to produce the requisite equilibrium. Locke combined the metaphysical and the philosophical attributes to an enviable degree. Hence the improvements in this science which are dated from him. His followers of the French school, together with Berkeley and Hume, Hartley and Priestley, made very few real advances, in consequence of the undue preponderance of metaphysics in their speculations. The Scotch school, so called, vibrated with too forcible a reaction to the opposite extreme. Reid and Stewart were great philosophers, and it is impossible to rise from the study of their works without large improvement and gratitude; and nature undoubtedly formed them to be also great metaphysicians. They wanted not invention, wing, or acumen. But they fastidiously and conscientiously folded up their excursive powers, or only opened them to brood over the chaos in which the science of the mind lay darkening beneath them. They struck out from the mass no brilliant revolving orb. This peculiarity, we apprehend, is the cause of a considerable depression of their original reputation, and has emboldened the critics to intrude upon Mr Stewart's weary and honorable retreat, with asking, what he has done? An insatiable world is not contented with seeing the old cumbrous rubbish removed from the path of science, though the labor is performed, like that of Virgil's swain, in ever so elegant a manner. disappointment experienced with regard to the Scotch school of mental philosophers, from whom so much was expected, and who were supposed to be making a last grand experiment, we ascribe the unmerited neglect, which has been paid to the works of the late Dr Brown. But it is a neglect which will not continue. Every year will increase the number of his readers. He had the happiness of combining the genius of the severest inductive philosophy with an adventurous metaphysical spirit, which Bacon himself neither by precept nor example condemned. To the The little volume before us was published a short time previous to the death of its author. It comprehends the outlines. only of one portion of his whole course of lectures.* About * We understand that the metaphysical, or rather physiological portion of Dr Brown's Lectures has lately been introduced as a classic manual at Harvard University. We trust it will be regarded as respectfully cooperating only, and not interfering with this laudable arrangement, if we suggest a substitution of Dr Brown's own 'Sketch' in the room of his extended Lectures. It is a thin, portable volume happily drawn up. It contains all that essentially and strictly belongs to the subject of the corresponding Lectures. It is generally broken into short manageable paragraphs, of convenience both to teacher and pupils. It avoids the numerous quotations, unending repetitions, and diffused amplifications of the larger work. It is equally as clear and intelligible as that; perhaps more so. It was intended for publication. The Lectures were left incompletely prepared. In every point of view we should think the 'Sketch' a preferable Text Book. If reprinted in our country, a neat edition could not exceed in price one dollar. A teacher might illustrate from the larger work whatever should appear deficient in the smaller, and the pupil would read with heightened pleasure the Lectures, after becoming familiar with the abstract. the close of the same year the Lectures appeared in Edinburgh, as a posthumous publication in four volumes, and have since been reprinted in our own country. At some future period we hope to call the attention of our readers more particularly to this latter work; and in the mean time, our present observations will be found to apply as strictly to the first half or more of Dr Brown's Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind as to the volume before us, which the author, with his own decaying hand, abstracted from them. According to the extensive scope of the views of Dr Brown, the Philosophy of the Human Mind comprehends the following subjects. I. Mental Physiology. II. General Ethics. IV. Natural Theology. We will proceed to unfold, in the first place, the author's favorite science of Mental Physiology. The object of all physical inquiry is twofold. We either attempt to ascertain the constituent coexisting elements of substances, as we find them at any given moment, and as they compose an apparently continuous whole, or we consider them as the subjects, or as the agents of those changes, which constitute the physical events of the system of the world. What is this piece of glass? If we consider it merely as a continuous whole, our answer will be, that it is a compound of alkaline and siliceous matter. But if we consider it as the agent or the subject of changes, we speak of its refractive powers, its fusibility at a certain temperature, its resistance to dissolution by the common powerful acids, and the like. In short, we consider the substances, into the nature of which we inquire, in these two lights alone, as they exist in space, or as they exist in time. The foregoing views are applied by the author to the physiology of the mind. We know neither the essential substance of matter nor of mind; but the author maintains that the phenomena of thought and feeling have the same relation to the unknown internal essence of the substance mind, which a brittle or a fusible state has to that of the substance glass, or which any sensible properties whatever have to that of the substance in which they inhere. All these various phenomena of thought and feeling he regards as nothing more than modifications, or affections, or states of the mind, which is a simple, uniform principle. They may be complex, like the properties of matter, and so be susceptible of analysis, or they may be the agents and the subjects of innumerable changes among each other, and so sustain the reciprocal relation of causes and effects. In conformity to these statements, the author proposes, in the first place, to institute a strict mental analysis, a department of philosophy which he complains has hitherto been much neglected. Some of our mental phenomena are evidently simple, as the feeling of pain, the sensation of color, and that of sound. Others again are complex, or composed of different simple states of the mind, as we shall soon see to be the case with Appetite, and other feelings. What the chemist does in matter, the intellectual analyst does in mind. His object is to develop the elements of any complex sentiment or emotion, and to show that it virtually bears the same relation of seeming comprehensiveness to those several elements, that is borne by a piece of glass to the various separate elements to which it is reduced by the chemist. In commencing his introspective analysis, Dr Brown seizes hold of Memory as the handle and instrument of all his inquiries. On this faculty itself he scarcely bestows either definition, description, or analysis. He assumes it at once as the dos nov or of his whole system. Let us then for the present grant him Memory, if by this single mystery he promises to solve all other mysteries. The first fortress of old error, against which he marches with this simple talisman, is Consciousness. He attacks this first, since all the varieties of those everchanging feelings, which form the subjects of his inquiry, are referred to it. He maintains that it is no distinct power of the mind, as it has always been supposed to be. He rigorously denies that at one and the same moment you can have a sensation or an idea, and also have a separate simultaneous feeling of consciousness about it. In the very next instant after the sensation or the idea, however, you have the memory of it. With the memory, moreover, you have an intuitive belief, that you, who just now had the sensation or idea, are the same indivi |