CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Dr. Brown-Mackintosh.

SECTION I.

Dr. Brown.

R. THOMAS BROWN1 was a native of the parish of Kirkma

was

minister; but he died shortly after the birth of the future philosopher, and the family then removed to Edinburgh. There he received the rudiments of his education from his mother, and at the age of seven he was sent by his relatives to school in England. At the age of fourteen he returned, entered the University of Edinburgh, attended the logic class and Stewart's courses of lectures. But in 1798 he was studying law, which, however, he soon relinquished for medicine. He attended the medical classes from 1798 to 1803, when he graduated M.A., having been over ten years a student in the University. Thus Brown had the advantage of the instruction of several eminent professors who then illumined this school.

In 1805, he ventured into what has been called the Leslie controversy, touching the heterodoxy of John Leslie, whom the clergy wished to exclude from the chair of mathematics, on the ground that he had enounced views on causation similar to David Hume's; and in reference to this, Brown published his Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect, defending Hume's theory that this relation is merely one of constant antecedence and sequence. He was for some time assistant to Dr. James Gregory; but a wider field for the exercise of his genius awaited him.

It was in the summer of 1810, with the full approval of Stewart himself, that Brown was appointed his colleague and successor in the chair of moral philosophy. He was an interesting, cultured man, with a glowing poetical fancy, combined with other qualities of mind

1 Born in 1778; died in 1820.

of a rarer form, and he soon became popular. Those who had the good fortune to listen to his lectures were delighted with them; and his career as a professor, though comparatively short, was a brilliant success. His lectures were published shortly after his death in 1820, and attained a remarkable popularity; for before 1852 eighteen editions had been issued in great Britain, and more in America.2

They contain a systematic exposition of the philosophy of the human mind. In his introductory lectures he explains the scope and limits of the subject, the relation of the philosophy of the mind to the sciences in general, and to the mental sciences, arts, and moral culture in particular; and he did this in an interesting and attractive manner, well suited to arrest the attention of a youthful audience. He told his class :-" Though I shall endeavour to give as full a view as my limits will permit of all the objects of inquiry which are to come before us, it will be my chief wish to awake in you, or to cherish, a love of those sublime inquiries themselves. There is a philosophic spirit which is far more valuable than any limited acquirements of philosophy; and the cultivation of which, therefore, is the most precious advantage that can be derived from the lessons and studies of many academic years-a spirit which is quick to pursue whatever is within the reach of human intellect, but which is not less quick to discern the bounds that limit every human inquiry, and which, therefore, in seeking much, seeks only what man may learn-which knows how to distinguish what is just in itself from what is merely accredited by illustrious names; adopting a truth which no one has sanctioned, and rejecting an error of which all approve, with the same calmness as if no judgment were opposed to its own." 3

He devotes several lectures to an explanation of the methods of inquiry in physical science in general, of power, cause and effect, hypothesis and theory; and in these he manifested considerable powers of exposition. He insisted strongly that the method of inquiry in physical science, should also be followed in mental science.

The chief features of Brown's psychology may be briefly indicated thus:-Fundamentally, it is a simple form of idealism, which recognises primary beliefs, while its conception of method is two-fold-(1) The mental phenomena may be viewed as successive, and so suscep

2 His lectures extend to one hundred, and, with his unfinished text-book, contain all that he wrote on the philosophy of the mind.

3 Vol. 1., pp. 14-15, 18-20.

tible of arrangement in the order of their succession, as causes and effects; (2) viewed as complex, and consequently susceptible of analysis; and it was chiefly in the latter relation that he conceived the philosophy of the mind to be a science of progressive discovery. In this relation it still presented an inexhaustible field of inquiry, since the mind is continually forming new combinations, which modify its subsequent thoughts and emotions, the results of which it is the end of mental analysis to reduce to their original elements. In accordance with this conception, he divided the whole phenomena of the mind into two classes-the internal and external affections; the second class is simple and requires few sub divisions, but the first, as it comprehends the far greater part of the mental phenomena, admits of many sub-divisions, as aids to arrangement and exposition. The first great sub-division of the intellectual class, is into the intellectual states of mind and emotions. But our external affections have their causes in external objects, while the internal affections arise from the previous feelings or emotions of the mind itself; both classes co-exist, and cannot always be considered as arising separately. Hence the different views which have been taken of perception and the existence of the external world.

Brown treated sensation at length, minutely analysing the different tribes of our sensations, as he called them, through all the external

After some explanation of the physical side of the process, he follows the same order as Reid in discussing the first four external senses, and he avers that none of our sensations arising through smelling, taste, or hearing afford us any original knowledge of the existence of external things, though we seem to act on such an assumption. He dwells long and interestingly on the early sensations of touch, and rightly assigns to them a priority over all our other sensations. Those qualities of bodies supposed to be made known to us by touch he reduced to two-resistance and extension; and he endeavoured to show that our muscular frame is the organ through which these external qualities are originally felt. He illustrated this view in various ways.4

He minutely explained the points touching perception wherein. he differed from Reid. In the preceding account of Reid's doctrines, it was shown that he held to an intuitive knowledge of the primary qualities of bodies; Brown maintained that we have no such intuitive

Vol. I., pp. 481, 483, 484.

knowledge of bodies. Speaking of perception in reference to the primary and secondary qualities of bodies, he says:-"In both, it is the effect of the pressure of an external cause, and in both it must be relative only, to that particular cause which produced it; the knowledge of which cause, in the case of extension, as much as in the case of fragrance, is nothing more than the knowledge that there is within us something which is not our mind itself, but which exists, as we cannot but believe, permanently and independent of our mind. What it is, as it exists in absolute independence of our perceptions, we who become acquainted with it, only by those very perceptions, know not in either case. We must still believe our perceptions themselves to be altogether different and distinct from the external causes, whatever they may be, which have produced them; to be, in short, phenomena purely mental, and to be this equally, whether they relate to the primary or the secondary qualities of matter; our notion of extension, in whatever way the Deity may have connected it with the presence of external things, being as much a state of the mind as our notion of sweetness or sound." 5

He occupies two lectures with a criticism of Dr. Reid's claims. in regard to the ideal system of perception. He argues that Reid misunderstood the real opinions of philosophers; that many of them held a view of perception similar to his own; that the supposed difference arose from Reid's having imagined as real "what was merely intended as metaphorical, and overthrown opinions which the authors, to whom he ascribes them, would themselves have been equally eager to overthrow." His attack upon Reid's claims is remarkably virulent. But it should be observed that neither Reid nor Brown himself was strong in the history of philosophical opinions; in the case of both their knowledge of systems and theories of recorded thought was limited and inaccurate. The natural result was that both of them have sometimes fallen into mistakes concerning the views of preceding philosophers and schools. In short, Brown. had a stronger passion for quoting poetry than for making wise and accurate references to the doctrines of prior philosophers.

In so far as Brown's psychology is not the issue of his own analytic powers, it is indebted to Reid, to those British thinkers who had given prominence to the principles of associations in explaining

Vol. I., p. 582, et seq.

6 Vol. II., p. 51; Lectures, 26, 27, 28.

mental phenomena, to Condillac, and a few other French philosophers of the latter part of last century. He was naturally attracted towards those thinkers who had carried analysis to the farthest limits.

He classified the intellectual states of the mind (or cognition) into what he called two generic capacities (1) simple suggestion and (2) relative suggestion. Simple suggestion meant what is usually termed the laws of association. But he intended to give these a wider application, and therefore adopted a classification which he conceived to be most in accordance with the associative principle. As the influence of this principle itself extends not merely to ideas but to every affection of the mind, all our emotions may be revived in a certain degree by its influence, or may become blended with the ideas or other feelings which awaken them, in the same way as our conceptions of external objects.7

His primary laws of simple suggestion are (1) Resemblance, (2) Contrast, (3) Contiguity; and he reduced what he called the supposed mental faculties of memory, conception, and imagination to simple suggestion. In his exposition of these principles of association, he exhibited great analytic powers and an amazing fertility of illustration. He was also masterly in summarising; and the following quotation, touching his reduction of conception and memory to the principle of suggestion, though abridged, will afford an indication of his powers in this particular :

"Gentlemen, the inquiries which have occupied us with respect to the phenomena of the principle of suggestion have, I hope, shown you what that principle is, as distinguished from other principles of our mental constitution. It becomes necessary, however, in justification of that simple arrangement which I ventured to propose to you, to consider this principle, not merely in relation to the phenomena which I have included under it, but also in relation to other arrangements, and to show that this one general tendency of the mind is sufficient to account for a variety of phenomena which have been referred to peculiar powers of the understanding. This I endeavoured to prove in my last lecture, with respect to two of these supposed intellectual powers-conception and memory.

"In the first place, I showed that conception, far from being distinguished from suggestion, is only a particular operation of that very principle; what are called the laws of association in relation to our

7 Vol. II., pp. 189, 197-199, et seq.