TJie Scottish Naturalist. 7 



'* unconscious sensation " only after this sort, we had better 

 apply to one who is neither of them, or rather who is both of 

 them, and see if we cannot get something more satisfactory. 

 Sensations, either conscious or unconscious, are not interpre- 

 table in terms of matter and motion, merely. And if the 

 physiologist can interpret them only thus, then they are beyond 

 his analysis. The psychologist is not shut up to call " uncon- 

 scious sensations " nonsense. He is far more fitted to deal with 

 wonders than the physiologist — at least the wonders that attach 

 to " neural processes," and come to perplex the terms of mere 

 '' matter and motion." It is just his province, while he rises 

 up through material phonomena, and carries their terms with 

 him for the explanation that they may find it impossible to get 

 on their own platform, to occupy a higher range of fact and to 

 find causes and movements which though they may look away 

 to new and farther mysteries, yet solve at least the difficulties of 

 the regions lower down. " The reaction of a sensory organ," 

 as a name for a sensation in the physiologist's mouth, or, for 

 the same, " mental process," is to the psychologist, much greater 

 nonsense than the expression '' unconscious sensations." 



Mr. Lewes has well drawn attention to " the many 

 difficulties which lie in the way of psychological investigation,' 

 complicated as they are "by the deplorable and inevitable 

 ambiguity of communication, resulting from an absence o 

 strictly defined technical terms " (Mind No. 2, art. i). These 

 difficulties will not be removed out of the region with which we 

 have been concerned in this paper, till the phenomena of 

 unconsciousness are better expiscated than Mr. Lewes has done 

 in the articles from which we have quoted. The word " con- 

 sciousness," must be confined to the mental action that is 

 characteristic alone of self-conscious, self-regulated minds. 

 Then w^ shall find a precise and special name for unconscious 

 sensitive intelligence, as we find it apparently a precise and 

 and special fact. 



Hi. Volition is, Hke sensibility, a power of intelligence, but it 

 is one of a very different and much higher kind. The 

 possession of this power is to man matter of inward experience, 

 or consciousness. We have no higher evidence of anything than 

 we have of our possession of this power. But observa- 

 tion shows that much of our action, that, from its adaptiveness 

 and purposive character, might be ascribed to intention or will, 

 is not voluntary, either mediately or immediately, but is due to 



