On the principles and method of a practical science of mind : a reply to a criticism / by Thomas Laycock.

  • Thomas Laycock
Date:
1862
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the principles and method of a practical science of mind : a reply to a criticism / by Thomas Laycock. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    can a system so developed have any practical bearing on the educa- tion and mental hygiene of youth any more than on the cure and relict ot mental disorder and weakness ? Doubtless my critic is in all this true to the principles of his method, which restricts even the sphere of speculation, while it is confessedly opposed to induction and generalisation; but then he is faithless to his definition of prac- tical metaphysics, even in the most limiteil sense. Perhaps Dr. Bushnan does not mean seriously to insist that, while in every other branch of science a basis for wider generalisations is sought in a wider field of inquiry, this old restrictive method will be allowed to be the best for the development of mental science. If he do, however (as his words imply), then I take the opj^osite side, and maintain that mental science can only be advanced by the same method of wider generalisation from a broader field of inquiry, and that if the metajjhysician v,i\\ restrict his researches to man, he must at least take man as a whole. But even a science of mind established on such \Aider basis as the Avhole of human natiu-e, would be wholly insufficient for the practical purposes we have set forth, if it were limited to that absolutely. Man is endowed with conciousness in common with other vertebrate animals; nor as to the higher of the group are even his intellectual faculties different in kind.* Hence, there is a comparative mental science, just as there is a comparative physiology, practically available to the training and hygiene of domestic animals on the one hand, and on the other to the generalisations of human mental science. Doubtless Dr. Bushnan ■\nll say, and very truly, that he includes this in his metaphysical psychology,^ under the term eneo-psychology but he will not affirm that it is a part of it in the same sense, and with the same results, as comparative physiology is a part of general or human physiology. On the contrary, the Cartesians denied that the lower animals had any consciousness at all; they were, according to that specidative system of metaphysics, insentient machines.f Pro- bably a comparative psychology, thus used, will throw more light on the true nature of many forms of insanity, imbecility, and idiotcy, than any other extension of the inquiry, because so many of them are reallv degradations of the man in the direction of lower creatures. There is, however, another nn])ortant aspect of the question. When once the practical princi])le is admitted, that conscious states must be examined in their relation with vital conditions, on the ground that human thought is inseparable on earth from fife, the inquiry must consist in a conjoined observation of the two in all organisms endowed with consciousness, however simple. Now, while we have comparatively no difliculty in noting the order of suc- * Roid, Hamilton, and Mill, in 'Mind and Brain,' vol. i, p. 71. f See the evidence of this, and of the practical noglect, hy Reid, and others, of comparative psychology, in ' Mind and Brain,' vol. i, p. 67.