upon, it necessarily vanishes with the faculty to which that attribute is ascribed. But, even on the theory of faculties, the doctrine cannot sustain itself. That a certain conclusion is come to, or a certain truth discerned, by every intelligent being who is cognisant of the premises or the facts, no more makes the faculty of drawing the conclusion or discerning the truth impersonal-i. e. alien from the individual who deduces the inference or exercises the discernment,- than the circumstance of every person with a nose smelling the fragrance of musk or lavender elevates that distinguished feature into an impersonal organ of sense, and removes it out of the category of private possessions.

case.

Nor does the fact of the operations attributed to Reason being independent of volition (which is a great argument with M. Cousin) at all alter the It is a mere arbitrary if not an unmeaning assertion, that the Will is alone the person the ego; and, consequently, proving a thing to be involuntary does not prove it to be impersonal. An act of discerning, a bodily pain, an emotion of joy, are all as independent of volition as a process of reasoning can be; and should therefore, on the same ground, be excluded from being personal to the sensitive and intellectual being; who would then indeed be neither sensitive nor intellectual, but an automaton simply capable of voluntary action. All his feelings and intellectual acts would be felt and done by

something not himself, and consequently would not be his.

Further, I question whether any one can attach a clear positive meaning to the phrase impersonality of Reason. Were the faculty in any conceivable sense an impersonal entity, we certainly should have no means of becoming acquainted with it. We could not of course discern an intellectual faculty through the organs of sense, and we could not be internally conscious of a faculty not belonging to us. In what way, then, could it possibly come to our knowledge?

LETTER XII.

THE AMBIGUITY OF CERTAIN TERMS.

My present Epistle you will please to regard as forming a sort of parenthesis.

The view which I have taken in the preceding Letters of the operations and affections of the mind, if it have no other value, will enable me, as I before remarked, to speak of them with a considerable degree of precision.

With the same design of attaining and assisting others to attain precision of language, I purpose in my present Letter to call your attention to an important ambiguity, if I may so denominate it, to which some of the expressions employed both by myself and others in the designation and description of mental phenomena are liable.

What I allude to is well exemplified in the double use (almost unavoidable) of the term perception, and the occasional confusion and false inferences thence arising.

This is a species of relative term which designates what for want of a better name may be described as a double, or compound, or two-sided, but yet indivisible fact. Just as a leaf or piece of paper must

have two sides that may be separately viewed but cannot be disjoined, so there are some facts which consist of two parts equally inseparable in reality although distinguishable in description. Should this statement strike you as not very clear, a brief explanation may, I hope, elucidate it.

It is plain that there can be no perception without both a percipient being and an object perceived; and, conversely, there can be no object perceived without a percipient being. Both the act of the percipient being, and the object which he perceives, are expressed or implied in the word perception, forming essential and inseparable parts of its meaning; and this leads to the use of the term in two modes, according to the part or side of the phenomenon which happens to be principally contemplated at the time or is most prominently in view. When our attention is directed to the percipient being, we employ the term perception to denote his act, coupling it probably with the mention of the object, as, for instance, in the sentence, "his perception of the scene was momentary," in which connexion the word is equivalent to the active participle perceiving.

When our attention, on the other hand, is chiefly directed to the object perceived, we frequently designate the latter by the same term, particularly when the word is used with the indefinite article or in the plural number. We are constantly speaking of our "perceptions" when we intend simply

the objects perceived, as in the expression, "our recollections, or conceptions, are copies of our perceptions," meaning copies of what we have perceived, not of our acts of perceiving, although the latter are necessarily implied- copies, in fact, of external objects.

Now, although the term should in rigour be restricted to the act or state of the mind, yet it may, without inconsistency and confusion, be employed in this latter way to designate external objects in contraposition to recollections, or conceptions, or, as I should prefer calling them, representative ideas, or simply ideas.

But there are two other modes of using it, which are not equally harmless; one of them being selfinconsistent, and the other being confused.

The self-inconsistent mode is when in the same argument the word is employed first to denote the mental act and then the objects of the act, as in the reasoning that because perception is an operation purely mental, therefore, all our perceptionsmeaning the objects perceived-are mental; or, putting the conclusion in still stronger language, therefore the objects perceived have no existence but in the mind.

The confused mode is when the term is employed so as really to imply (often undesignedly) something distinct on the one hand from the act of the percipient being, and on the other from the object perceived, as when it is said that our perceptions are like or unlike external objects.