Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)

by Thomas Brown

Of this system,—which deserves some fuller notice, on account both of the great talents which have stated and defended it, and of its very wide diffusion,—I may remark, in the first place, that it is far from being, what its author and his followers consider it to be, a mere developement of the system of our illustrious countryman. On the contrary, they agree with Locke only in one point, and that a negative one,—as to which all philosophers may now be considered as unanimous,—the denial of what were termed innate ideas. In every thing which can be strictly said to be positive in his system, this great philosopher is nearly as completely opposed to Condillac and his followers, as to the unintelligible wranglers of the ancient schools. To convince you of this, a very slight statement of the two systems will be sufficient.

According to Locke, the mind, to whose existence thought or feeling is not essential, might, but for sensation, have remained forever without feeling of any kind. From sensation we acquire our first ideas,—to use a word, which, from its ambiguity I am not very fond of using, but which, from its constant occurrence, is a very important one in his system. These ideas we cannot merely remember as past, and compound or decompound them in various ways, but we can compare them in all their variety of relations; and according as their objects are agreeable or disagreeable, can love or hate those objects, and fear or hope their return. We remember not external things only, so as to have ideas of them,—ideas of sensation,—but we remember also our very remembrance itself,—our abstractions, comparisons, love, hate, hope, fear, and all the varieties of reflex thought, or feeling; and our remembrance of these internal feelings, or operations of our mind, furnishes another abundant source of ideas, which he terms ideas of reflection. The comparison, however,—and it is this point alone which can be of any consequence in reference to the French system,—the comparison, as a state of the mind, even when it is exercised on our sensations or perceptions, is not itself a sensation or perception,—nor is our hope, or fear, or any other of our reflex feelings; for then, instead of the two sources of our ideas, the distinction of which forms the very groundwork of the Essay on the Human Understanding, we should truly have but one source, and our ideas of reflection would themselves be the very ideas of sensation to which they are opposed. Our sensations, indeed, directly or indirectly give rise to our reflex feelings, but they do not involve them; they are only prior in order,—the occasions, on which certain powers or susceptibilities of feeling in the mind evolve themselves.

Such is the system of Locke, on those very points, on which the French philosophers most strangely profess to regard him as their great authority. But it is surely very different from the system, which they affect to found on it. According to them, sensation is not merely that primary affection of mind, which gives occasion to our other feelings, but is itself, as variously composed or decomposed, all the variety of our feelings. “If we consider,” says Condillac, in a paragraph, which may be said to contain a summary of his whole doctrine, with respect to the mind—“if we consider that to remember, to compare, to judge, to distinguish, to imagine, to be astonished, to have abstract ideas, to have ideas of number and duration, to know truths, whether general or particular, are but so many modes of being attentive; that to have passions, to love, to hate, to hope, to fear, to will, are but so many different modes of desire; and that attention, in the one case, and desire, in the other case, of which all these feelings are modes, are themselves, in their origin, nothing more than modes of sensation, we cannot but conclude, that sensation involves in itself—enveloppe—all the faculties of the soul.”[135]

Whatever we may think of this doctrine, as true or false, ingenious or absurd, it seems, at least, scarcely possible, that we should regard it as the doctrine of Locke—of him, who sets out, with a primary division of our ideas, into two distinct classes, one class of which alone belongs to sensation; and who considers even this class of our mere ideas, not as involving all the operations of the mind with respect to them, but only as the objects of the mind, in these various operations;—as being what we compare, not the very feeling of our comparison itself—the inducements to passion, not what constitutes any of our passions, as a state, or series of states, of the mind. To render the paragraph, which I have quoted from Condillac, at all accordant with the real doctrine of Locke, it would be necessary to reverse it, in almost every proposition which it involves.

The doctrine, then, as exhibited by Condillac and his followers, whatever merit it may have in itself, or however void it may be of merit of any kind, is not the doctrine of him from whom it is said to be derived. But its agreement or disagreement with the system of any other philosopher, is comparatively, of very little consequence. The great question is, whether it be just,—whether it truly have the merit of presenting a faithful picture of the mental phenomena, which it professes to develope to us more clearly.

Have we reason to believe, then, that all the various feelings of our mind, which form the classification of its internal affections, are merely, to use Condillac's phrase, transformed sensations?

Transformed sensations, it is evident, on his own principles, though the phrase might seem vague and ambiguous, in any other system, can mean nothing more than sensations more or less lively, or more or less complex. It cannot signify any thing that is absolutely different or superadded; for, if there be any thing, in any complex feeling of the mind, which did not originally form a sensation, or a part of a complex sensation, this addition, however slight, is itself a proof, that all the phenomena of the mind are not mere sensations, variously repeated—that sensation, in short, does not “involve” all the affections and faculties of the soul.

Is every feeling, then, in the whole series of our varied consciousness, referable, in all its parts, to sensation, as its original source?—not its source merely, in one very evident respect, as that which is, in order, truly primary to all our other feelings, but as that which essentially constitutes them all, in the same manner as the waters of the fountain are afterwards the very waters which flow along the mead?

To prove the affirmative of this, it is astonishing, with what readiness Condillac,—who is generally regarded as a nice and subtile reasoner, and who certainly, as his work on that subject shows, had studied with attention the great principles of logic,—passes from faculty to faculty, and from emotion to emotion, professing to find sensation everywhere, without exhibiting to us even the semblance of what he seeks, and yet repeating the constant affirmative, that he has found it,—as if the frequent repetition, were itself a proof of what is frequently repeated,—but proving only that the various feelings of the mind agree, as might be supposed, in being feelings of the mind—not that they agree in being sensations, as that word is used by himself, and as it is, in common philosophic use, distinguished from the other more general term. Except the mere frequency of the affirmation, and the unquestionable priority in order of time, of our sensations to our other feelings,—there is not the slightest evidence, in his system, of that universal transmutation which it affirms.