22 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



turning, he has been enlarging on that " exj^ectancy " and " preposses- 

 sion " which have been so perverting the vision of many in their ob- 

 servation of facts. He will not be offended with me if I hint that it is 

 just possible that he himself may unconsciously be under the influence 

 of these, when, on finding how much can be explained by physiologi- 

 cal processes, he imagines he can account in the same way for purely 

 mental operations. 



On some points Dr. Carpenter has been vigorously opposing the 

 materialism of the day : " In reducing the thinking man to the level of 

 a puppet, that moves according as its strings are pulled, the material- 

 istic philosopher places himself in complete antagonism to the positive 

 conviction, which, like that of the existence of an external world, is felt 

 by every right-minded man, who does not trouble himself by speculat- 

 ing upon the matter, that he really does possess a self-determining 

 power, which can rise above all the promptings of suggestion, and can, 

 within certain limits, mould external circumstances to its own re- 

 quirements instead of being completely subjugated by them." ("Men- 

 tal Physiology," 5.) By such utterances, worthy of the son of Lant 

 Carpenter, of Bristol, he has gained the confidence of a number of 

 anti-materialistic and religious men, who may find, however, that he 

 is conducting them into a place between two armies where they are 

 exposed to the fire of both. At this point he has been abandoned by 

 the disciples of Bain, Huxley, and Tyndall, by M. Ribot, and the 

 writers in the Revue Scientifique, the organ of the school in France 

 who wonder that he should stop where he has. For, if material agency 

 can generate so much, can account for imagination and genius gener- 

 ally, can explain our higher intellectual efforts of judgment and rea- 

 soning, can fashion conscience and gender the obligation of duty and 

 the sense of guilt, and our reverence for the unseen and the sublime, 

 why may it not also produce will, an operation evidently so swayed by 

 causes? They who follow Dr. Carpenter will soon find that they have 

 very insecure footing, and must either go forward and identify will, 

 as they do intelligence, with material agency, or retreat so far back 

 as to hold that there are many other operations, such as the discern- 

 ment of higher truth and higher goodness, which cannot be derived 

 from atoms. If there be such an agent as will and I agree with Dr. 

 Carpenter in thinking that consciousness testifies in its behalf then 

 we must provide a compartment for it, and we may place there reason 

 and our ideas of the good, the infinite, and the perfect. 



Dr. Carpenter's views of the attributes of the mind seem to me to 

 be very inadequate. They were formed about the time when Hart- 

 ley's " Observations on Man" and James Mill's "Analysis of the Hu- 

 man Mind" were reckoned the highest authorities among the Unita- 

 rians who felt Priestley's influence. Dr. Carpenter evidently looks 

 upon the operations of the mind as composed of sensations and ide- 

 ations. His view of both these is very insufficient. In all sense-per- 



