298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Bacon had justly reproached the physicians of his time for their neglect to make 

 records of the cases of their patients. . . . Sydenham. ... by his bedside 

 study again brought it into favor." And finally, " he found English medicine 

 reduced to the lowest state of empiricism — he raised it once more to the dignity 

 of a science of observation." ^ 



The disposition in which Locke entered on his inquiry was certainly 

 " to exclude prevailing theories," for he has himself recorded that his 

 Essay originated in a conviction that, before advancing to abstruse 

 problems, " it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what 

 objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with." 

 His method of induction was truly Baconian ; he approached the sub- 

 ject without any clear design, proceeded without a plan, and attained 

 such results as can be so reached. But the " laws ruling the " forma- 

 tion of ideas were elucidated, and mixed and simple modes " described 

 with an accuracy" and in one or two cases with "a graphic coloring" 

 which have not been greatly surpassed. The philosophy of the mind 

 he found an untrodden jungle, with a few bridle-paths in the directions 

 marked " Sense," " Appetite," etc. ; he cut a highway through the part 

 where the bush was thickest — the region of ideas. The a 2>riori 

 method was in favor, and " bedside study " of the human patient out 

 of fashion; the a 2^Tiori method he did not indeed kill, but he left it 

 to die a lingering death ; and though to Hobbes belongs the honor of 

 introducing the experimental method into Psychology, it may be 

 truly said of Locke that he " raised it to the dignity of a science of 

 observation." And just as Sydenham, follower of Hippocrates as he 

 was, attributed a number of diseases to morbid fermentation in the 

 humors, so Locke, in spite of his antischolasticism, could still assign 

 the motion of the " animal spirits " as a " natural cause " of certain 

 ideas.^ The defects and the merits, in truth, of Locke's procedure were 

 equally those of the physical science of the age. The patient observa- 

 tion of which Sydenham set the example gave rise to the first discrimi- 

 native account — we can hardly call it analysis — of the proximate origin 

 and more obvious constituents of our ideas. To the same causes and 

 doubtless also to the impulse of conquest in unexplored regions which 

 the post-mediaeval world owed to Bacon, we may ascribe it that Locke's 

 " Essay," as he named it, " inquiry," as he described it, was the first 

 comprehensive survey of mental phenomena; while the small part 

 which hypothesis and theory play in his investigation, his incomplete 

 statement of mental causation of all kinds, his bare discovery of asso- 

 ciation as producing a few obvious compounds, were clearly due to the 

 unspeculative character of the contemporary science to the influence 

 of which he was most exposed. 



Berkeley's most notable contribution to philosophy belongs rather 

 to the metaphysics, than to the psychology, of sensation ; and his less 



1 Mr. Balthazar W. Foster, in "Essays of Birmingham Speculative Club," pp. 277, 

 2*78. 2 u Essay," book ii., ch. xxxiii. 



