412 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thickness rests upon the bed, over which it moves with a pressure of 

 more than 260,000 pounds for each square foot of surface, and many 

 such as this covered the old glacier-regions through an unmeasured pe- 

 riod of time. In their movement lakes were excavated, water-courses 

 changed, and landscapes cast into innumerable forms of beauty. We 

 utilize the results. Our forests and our harvests grow upon soil 

 ground in the glacial mill, and we build our cities on mounds of gla- 

 cial rubbish. Nor can we fail to realize that here, as elsewhere in the 

 phenomena of Nature, tliere is a ministration to our conscious life, as 

 there is an appeal to our sense of beauty, and that, whatever form 

 it may assume, whether of the feathery spangle which rocks upon the 

 waves of air, or the profound glacier that buries a continent, ice is 

 Winter's benefaction. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY. 



II. 



J. S. Mill — JBain — Spencer. 



&REAT as were the services of Mr. John Stuart Mill to Philoso- 

 phy in general, and Psychology in particular, we cannot ascribe 

 to him any notable advance in psychological doctrine, or in the concep- 

 tion or application of psychological method. Li doctrine, his chief 

 contributions were the restatement, in a form adapted to the changed 

 conditions of the controversies, of Berkeley's theory of material, and 

 Hume's theory of mental, existence. But neither the psychological 

 theory of mind nor the psychological theory of matter contains any 

 new principle, or exhibits any new way of applying old principles. 

 In constructive method, he could get no further than Brown's half- 

 century-old "chemistry of the mind," and though he earnestly recom- 

 mended the St. Andrew's students to make the acquaintance of Physi- 

 ology, as supplying to Psychology the principles of jDredisposition, 

 habit, and development,^ he never made the smallest use of these prin- 

 ciples himself, and had not a single word to say in favor of Mr. Spen- 

 cer's use of them.^ That he still traded on the old concejDtions is evi- 

 dent from his metaphors : the " thread of consciousness" is a decided 

 advance on Locke's " gang of ideas," but he shies at Prof. Masson's 

 '* organic union " of states, and prefers to connect them by an *' inex- 

 plicable tie." ^ Mill, in fact, was above all things a logician, and 

 whatever he accomplished in the sciences was in virtue of his clear 

 perception of the extent of a principle, the limitations to which it was 

 subject, and the conditions under which it could be most fruitfully ap- 



^ " Inaugural Address," pp. 61, 62. ^ » Dissertations," iii., 99, note. 



^ " Examination " (third edition), pp. 256, 257. 



