Lectures on the philosophy of the human mind / by the late Thomas Brown ; with a memoir of the author by David Welsh.

  • Thomas Brown
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the philosophy of the human mind / by the late Thomas Brown ; with a memoir of the author by David Welsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    40/736 page 2
    to reacli, and tlie defects of wliich we perhaps discover only by tlie aid of that purer hght, which was not indulged to them, they can scarcely be said to have left us a single analysis of the complex phenomena of thought and feel- ing. By some of them, indeed, especially by the Peripatetics and Stoics, much dialectic sub- tlety was employed in distinctions, that may seem at first to involve such an analysis ; but even these distinctions were verbal, or little more than verbal. The analytical investiga- tion of the mind, in all its complexity of per- ceptions, and thoughts, and emotions, was re- served to form almost a new science in the comprehensive philosophy of far later years. If, however, during the flom-ishing periods of Greek and Roman letters, this intellectual ana- lysis was httle cultivated, the department of the philosophy of the mind which relates to prac- tical ethics, was enriched, as I have said, by moral speculations the most splendid and sub- lime. In those ages, indeed, and in coun- tries in which no revealed will of Heaven had pointed out and sanctioned one unerring i-ule of right, it is not to be wondered at, that, to those who were occupied in endeavouring to trace and ascertain such a rule in the moral na- tm-e of man, all other mental inquiries should have seemed comparatively insignificant. It is even pleasing thus to find the most im- portant of all inquiries regarded as truly the most important, and minds of the highest ge- nius, in reflecting on their own constitution, so richly diversified and adorned with an al- most infinite variety of forms of thought, dis- covering nothing, in all this splendid variety, so worthy of investigation, as the conduct which it is fitting for man to pursue. But another period was soon to follow, a pe- riod in which ages of long and dreary ignorance were to be followed by ages of futile laboiu, as long and dreary. No beautiful moral specula- tions were then to compensate the poverty of in- tellectual science. But morality, and even reli- gion itself, were to be degraded, as little more than technical terms of a cold and unmeaning logic. The knowledge of our mental frame was then, uideed, professedly cultivated wth hiost assiduous zeal; and if much technical phraseology, and much contention, M'cre suffi- cient to constitute or elaborate science, that assiduous zeal might ^vcll deser\ c to have been rewarded with so honourable a name. But wliat reasonal)le hope of a progress tnily scien- tific could l)e formed, when to treat of the phi- losophy of mind was to treat of every thing but of the mind and its affections ; when some of the most important questions, with respect to it, were, Whether its essence were distinct from its existence ? whether its essence therefore might subsist, when it had no actual e.vist- ence ? and what were all the qualities inherent in it jvi a nonentilij 9 In morals, whether ethics were an art or a science? whether, if the mind had freedom of choice, this independent will be an entity or a quiddity ? and whether we should say, with a dozen schoolmen, that virtue is good, because it has intrinsic goodness, or, with a dozen more, that it has this intiinsic goodness, because it is good ? In natural theology, questions of equal mo- ment were contested with equal keenness and subtlety; but they related less to the Deity, of whose nature, transcendent as it is, the whole universe may be considered as in some degree a faint revelation, than to those spiritual mi- nisters of his power, of whose very existence natiure affords no evidence, and of whom reve- lation itself may be said to teach us httle but the mere existence. Whether angels pass from one point of space to another, without passing through the intermediate points ? whether they can visually discern objects in the dark? whe- ther more than one can exist at the same mo- ment in the same physical point ? whether they can exist in a perfect vacuum, mth any rela- tion to the absolute incorporeal void ? and whe- ther, if an angel were in vacuo, the void could still truly be termed perfect ?—Such, or simi- lar to these, were the great inquiries in that department of Natirral Theology, to which, as to a separate science, was given the name of Angiography; and of the same kind were the principal inquiries %vith respect to the Deity himself, not so much an examination of the evidence which nature affords of his self-exist- ence, and power, and \visdom, and goodness, those sublime qualities which even our weak- ness cannot contemplate without derinng some additional dignity from the very greatness which it adores, as a solution of more subtle points, whether he exist in imaginary space as much as in the space that is real ? whether he can cause a mode to exist without a substance ? whether, in knowing all tilings, he knows universals, or only tilings singular ? and whether he love a possible imexisting angel better than an actually existing insect ? Indignandum de isto, non disputandum est.— Sed nondebuit hoc nobis esse propo- situm argutadisserere,* et philosophiam in has angustias ex sua majestate detraliere. Quanto satius est, ire aperta \\& et recta, quam sibi ipsi flexus disponere, quos cum magna molestia de- beas relegere ?+— Why waste ourselves, says the same eloquent moralist; why tor- ture and waste oia^elves in questions, which there is more real subtlety in despising than in sohnng?— Quid te torques et maceras, in ea qucestione quam subtihus est contempsisse quam solvere?^ From the necessity of such inquiries we are now fortunately freed. The frivolous solem- nities of argimient, which, in the disputations of Scotists and Thomists, and the long con- troversy of the believers and rejecters of the • Argutias screre. Lect. var. \ Seneca, Ep. 102. i Ibiil. 49.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3