INQUIRIES: IN A SERIES OF ESSAYS, INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF THE PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION AND THE MENTAL FACULTIES. BY SIR BENJAMIN C. BRODIE, BART. D.C.L. V.P.R.S. CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE, ETC. SECOND EDITION. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 1855. 265.c.86. "THE perceptions of the senses are gross, but even in the senses there is a difference. Though harmony and properties are not objects of sense, yet the eye and the ears are organs which offer to the mind such materials, by means whereof she may apprehend both the one and the other. By experiments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of the soul; and from them, whether by a gradual evolution or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to memory. These become subjects for fancy to work on; reason considers and judges of the imaginations, and these acts of reason become new objects to the understanding. In this scale, each lower faculty is a step that leads to the one above it, and the uppermost naturally leads to the Deity, which is rather the object of intellectual knowledge than even of the discursive faculty, not to mention the sensitive. There runs a chain throughout the whole system of beings. In this chain one link drags another; the meanest things are connected with the highest. The calamity, therefore, is neither strange nor much to be complained of, if a low sensual reader shall, from mere love of the animal life, find himself drawn in, surprised, and betrayed into, some curiosity concerning the intellectual." SIRIS, A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions concerning the PREFACE ΤΟ THE SECOND EDITION. IN preparing another edition of the "Psychological Inquiries" for the press, I have taken the opportunity of correcting whatever inaccuracies I had found to exist in the original publication. At the same time I have, in different parts of the work, introduced some new matter, arising out of the further consideration of the subjects which I have ventured to discuss. Having received communications from various correspondents, I have not hesitated to avail myself of some of the suggestions which they have offered. There are others of which I should also gladly have availed myself, if it had not been that the greater part of the volume was in print before I received them. Among my correspondents there is one who seems to be of opinion that I have not suffi |