INTRODUCTION.

I.

IF I am not deceived, the following pages will show that, in so far as the study of Mind is concerned, those who have affected to employ the method of research which exclusively proceeds on intuition and deduction have been false to the method; have been betrayed into a morass of indefinite ideas and unwarranted assumptions; have, as regards the general, mistaken parts for their wholes; have been extremely perfunctory, so that while they have been ambitious to achieve exhaustive explanation, they have not been at pains to provide for themselves solid standing ground; have got themselves into such a plight that their motions are no longer means of progress; and that they have brought unmerited disgrace on the method which their indolence has misapplied.

I show that a legitimate and vigorous use of the method might have anticipated induction as regards the existence of an unconscious part of the mind, and of unconscious mental events of which conscious mental events are effects. One of the most famous of the philosophers who have brought this reproach on deduction has

B

given us an elaborate treatise on pure Reason, while leaving us to popular indefiniteness respecting Reason. Discussions about the relation of experience to knowledge abound, while a part of experience has been universally mistaken for the whole. An unimportant kind which it was convenient to Logicians to put in relief under the name Judgment, has masked one of the most important of the differences it behoves philosophy to distinguish, the difference between Apprehension and Judgment properly so called. so called. Recognition is due to a latent bearing of likeness of a certain degree on the mind. This bearing is now for the first

time made known.

The existence of consciousness

void of self-consciousness or what Leibnitz terms

Apperception was overlooked. Unconscious knowledge was ignored, although it should have been obvious that a man is not necessarily ignorant of what he is not thinking about. When the Mathema

tician is in coma, in dreamless sleep, or absorbed in a game of whist, his knowledge of mathematics persists. A latent operation of instances on the mind, one which causes general syntheses that first obtain as unconscious knowledge, has been mistaken for an operation of evidence, and confounded with inference-with induction.

Complements of attributes are (§ 110) the supports of the constituting attributes. Failure to imagine that a composite could be in the relation of support to the composing parts, combined with the necessity of thought which requires that attribute supposes support, occasioned the idea of the figment, Substance; which, like a foreign body in an organism, has been from the first fretting and diseasing its habitat. Of this philosophy is now, for the first time, rid.

What confusion must have reigned to give plausibility to the desperate doctrine, that the mind may be conversant about things inconceivable! Infinity and the First Cause are held by Sir William Hamilton to be things inconceivable, things unthinkable, and, nevertheless, things about which the mind is somehow conversant. The doctrine pretends that its marvel is determined by a law which it names the Law of the Conditioned. It has been approved by the adhesion of such notable minds as those of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Henry Longueville Mansel. By applying the notion of the species, ideas that are not appearances― inapparitional ideas,—I dare believe that I have precipitated the confusion which gave plausibility to the doctrine. An error which confounded Essence with Quality I have corrected.

The confusion of Will with intentional-instinct overcasts psychology, ethics, and morality. A mental act which differs from attention only in the respect that it persists in a mind which would fain be rid of it, was confounded with attention, to which it is essential to depend upon conscious effort,-effort that the agent is free to suspend at pleasure. The delusion which Nature puts upon us in connection with this counterfeit of attention, viz. that it is a volition, that, in respect of it, we are free agentsexemplifies a delusion commensurate with nearly the whole of the practical life of mankind. The removal of the error (Bk. III.) exposes a fact of tremendous importance. Proving deductively that Mind includes an unconscious part, the theatre of unconscious mental events, and inductively, that this part includes or is comprised by the brain, and that an unconscious mental event—a corporo-mental event-is a condition

sine qua non of a consciousness, I show that nearly the whole of the practical life of man is, has been, and, for an indefinite time to come, threatens to be, transacted by an unconscious force or agent, that we have been puppets, not personal agents—dupes as well as puppetsand, in view of the prevalence of wretchedness in human life, victims. I show that from this state of puppet, dupe, and victim, there is but one way of escape, that of self-denying conduct according to Wisdom. If, adopting an ideal of character opposed to his instincts, a man resolve to live in conformity with that ideal, and at cost of self-denial live accordingly, his practical life is initiated and controlled by his conscious mind, and is truly a personal life. In respect of it, he is voluntary,-a free-agent. He is master of himself, and, to a certain extent, of Nature. If this practice have, as Christianity presumes it to have, the property of altering the instincts with enhancement, the agent is in the way of terminating the conflict between Will and Instinct, by substituting a new man for the old, in the new, a mind that is partly the offspring of the will. What a salvation had Christianity elicited such a purgatory from the will of Christendom !

Having exposed what was false in the connotation of the term Substance, I employ the term as denoting according to the true part of its connotation, i.e. as denoting the naturally ungenerable and unannihilable part of the universe, what may be termed its perdurable part, that which, in changing, remains always intrinsically the same-the truly fundamental part of the τὸ πᾶν. I show that substance is the subject of an attribute in virtue of which it is sometimes mind, and for the most part, an equivalent of mind. This attribute I term orderly concurrence of aptitudes, dis