familiar with a passion he has often felt; with the circumstances by which it is aroused and directed, exasperated and mitigated; and with the conduct into which it leads him; although he has never had an opportunity of watching the effects of the passion on the behaviour of another. Self-study without extrinsic observation, might carry him a long way.

But, on the other hand, it would be plainly impossible for any one who had never experienced a passion himself to form a conception of the actuating motives of his neighbours while they were under its influence, and impossible to ascribe their actions to the right source. To him all would be inscrutable. They would be playing a game before his eyes of which he had never learned the moves, and which he would be wholly incapable of following.

There are obviously two different sets of circumstances to be learned in order to have the best possible knowledge of any given passion: (1) The course of the passion as we ourselves feel it in all its ebbs and flows, and their causes, together with the actions which it prompts us to do: (2) The actions which we observe it to prompt our neighbours to do, and which we attribute to the influence of the passion from extending to others the observations we have made on ourselves.

When any emotional law or mode of action is established by a concurrence of both kinds of

circumstances accurately noted, it has of course better claims to be accepted than if it had been founded on one, just as other laws derived from full and accurate examination have a superiority over such as are deduced from partial and incomplete evidence.*

The last part of the passage cited from Comte is scarcely happier than the preceding. All marked states of passion, he asserts, are incompatible with the state of observation-a position vague enough, but which means, I presume, or ought to mean to be pertinent, that when a man is filled with intense love or fear or joy or hope, he cannot observe the course or procedure of the emotion by which he is possessed. Why not? A man under the influence of some strong passion has certainly vivid ideas as well as vivid feeling, and what he so feels and thinks and imagines, leaves a deep impression on his memory. What is this but, as I have already explained, internal observation? It would scarcely have been more wide of the mark, had he said that a philosopher enthusiastically devoted to some physical science could not on account of his very

*The observations in the text may serve also as a reply to part of Mr. Buckle's disparagement of Psychology in his "History of Civilisation in England," see vol. i. pp. 16 and 144. With all his acknowledged ability and learning, he appears to me, I confess, to give very loose and inexact representations of metaphysical doctrines, and to be unacquainted with much that has been done in mental philosophy. (This note was written before his lamented death.)

enthusiastic devotion to it, observe the phenomena which the science presented. The author, I apprehend, was unwittingly thinking of a very different position, which may be readily mistaken for the one he has laid down, and which he seems accordingly to have confused with it—the position, namely, that a mind possessed with a powerful passion is often so engrossed with it and its accessories as to overlook every thing else, the whole attention, for the time, being absorbed by the predominant perturbation. This, however, is a very different thing from the mind not observing its own state, or a man not observing his own mental condition.

Wherever there is strong passion, there must be (for it is the same thing in different words) strong impressions and consequent strong recollections and reflections connected with it; in a word, all that constitutes vivid and active internal observation, furnishing materials for thought and classification and inference. What is not compatible with such a state of passion is the clear and full observation at the same time of present objects and passing events totally unconnected with it.

It is a singular circumstance that Comte, who was so hostile to those metaphysical entities which he represents as having in the progress of mankind long ruled the world, should not have discerned that in his depreciation or rather attempted destruction of Psychology, he was proceeding on an

assumption of just the same kind of fictitious personifications. His faculties observing each other are not a whit more real, have no more positive existence, than the crowd of metaphysical principles whose reign he traces or points to in the history of the past.

And not only did he fall into this capital inconsistency, but he was at the same time overlooking as subjects of systematic knowledge, the whole world of the phenomena of pure consciousness, and unphilosophically reducing or wishing to reduce the science of man to little else than physical manifestations and external actions.

LETTER II.

IDENTITY.

AN author who has written an able analysis of the human mind, says that "identity is a case of belief;" that when we affirm of an object to-day that it is the same object we saw yesterday, we merely express our belief that it is a particular object.*

That we have the belief is certain, but surely this is not all. Besides the belief there is the fact which is the subject of belief. Belief may be correct or incorrect, but this does not affect the fact which is what it is, however we may regard it.

Such an account of identity is evidently an imperfect one: it is a statement of what we do when we affirm anything to be the same, not an explanation of what sameness consists in.

Let us try if something more precise and definite cannot be wrought out. For this purpose it may be requisite, perhaps, to hazard some trite propositions as stepping-stones to others not equally evident.

1. Every particle in the universe is itself and

* Analysis of the Human Mind, by James Mill.