NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. NOTE A.-LETTER III. THE following extracts on the subject of this Letter, and in support of its general views, will probably be welcome to the inquirer who wishes to see important questions exhibited in the peculiar lights of various minds, especially as some of the passages are from writings perhaps not readily accessible. The author scarcely needs to add that, in presenting them to his readers, he by no means adopts every opinion or every expression which they contain. The first is from a writer now seldom referred to: "According to this manner of considering power, it is absolutely contradictory to maintain the unity of the mind, and yet to suppose the existence of distinct intellectual faculties or powers. If the primary cause in one series be different from the primary cause in another, we cannot refer both these series to the same principle. If we trace an action to the will, a recollection to the memory, or a judgment to the understanding, how shall we pretend that there is yet a more remote principle? By what inference shall we conclude that the power of imagination is derived from anything else; or that the faculty of comprehension is the delegate of any superior intelligence? All these separate powers are primary causes; at least, they are so to our understandings, if we can trace only to them any series of causes and effects. To say, then, that power is a primary, or creative, cause, is to admit that it is a principle, and in admitting it to be a principle, we must conclude against the unity of the human soul, while we continue to insist upon the existence of distinct mental powers."- Academical Questions, by Sir Wm. Drummond, p. 6. The next extract is from a work of the celebrated Broussais, translated from the French, and published in the United States, by a gentleman who emigrated a long time ago from this country, where he is still remembered as the author of an able volume of Ethical and Political Tracts: "What we call attention, perception of external objects, perception of our own thought or consciousness, idea, judgment, reasoning, memory, are not specific faculties, separate entities inhabiting the brain, put into action by the impressions that proceed from the senses, or by some pretended internal force independent of them, as has been asserted of le moi, or of consciousness, and of the memory; they are no other than varieties of cerebral perception, which we may observe as facts or phenomena, but which we cannot venture to explain. Still less are we permitted to adopt the poetry of metaphysics, and to personify these varieties or modifications, for the purpose of explaining the superiority of one over the rest, or the influence they exercise one over another, as active principles; for we cannot do this without treating these phenomena as if they were bodies cognizable by the senses, with which, in fact, they have nothing to do, for they can resemble nothing but themselves."-On Irritation and Insanity, by F. J. V. Broussais, translated by Thomas Cooper, M.D., President of the South Carolina College, p. 133. The views of Dr. Thomas Brown on this subject are well known, but the following short extract is too much to the purpose to be withheld: "Still less, I trust, is it necessary to repeat the warning, already so often repeated, that you are not to conceive that any classification of the states or affections of the mind, as referable to certain powers or susceptibilities, makes these powers anything different or separate from the mind itself, as originally and essentially susceptible of the various modifications of which these powers are only a shorter name. And yet what innumerable controversies in philosophy have arisen, and are still frequently arising, from this very mistake, strange and absurd as the mistake may seem. No sooner, for example, were certain affections of the mind classed together as belonging to the will, and certain others as belonging to the understanding that is to say, no sooner was the mind, existing in certain states denominated the understanding, and in certain other states denominated the will, than the understanding and the will ceased to be considered the same individual substance, and became immediately, as it were, two opposite and contending powers in the empire of mind, as distinct as any two sovereigns with their separate nations under their control; and it became an object of as fierce contention to determine whether certain affections of the mind belonged to the understanding or to the will, as, in the management of political affairs, to determine whether a disputed province belonged to one potentate or to another. Every new diversity of the faculties of the mind, indeed, converted each faculty into a little independent mind; as if the original mind were like that wonderful animal, of which naturalists tell us, that may be cut into an almost infinite number of parts, each of which becomes a polypus as perfect as that from which it was separated. The only difference is, that those who |