42 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



arise, and, if mind is merely a higlier manifestation of life, they must 

 be interpretable as life was interpreted. 



Intelligence in general is differenced from life in general by tlie 

 fact that the order of changes of which it consists is successive. The 

 science of intelligence having thus for its subject-matter a continued 

 series of changes, it is the business of Psychology to determine the 

 law of their succession. Bringing up the " law of correspondences " 

 left in the rear, it is found that one mental state tends to follow 

 another with a strength proportionate to the intimate union between 

 the external things they represent. Here is a " law of association " 

 of Hegelian depth, cutting down to the adamantine pillars of the uni- 

 verse, and compared with which the so-called laws of association are 

 mere empiricism. The law is also of Hegelian content — rivaling that 

 cocoon das Werden, and out of it shall be woven all the phenomena 

 of unfolding intelligence. Reflex action we have already seen Mr. 

 Bain incorporate in Psychology ; Mr. Spencer shows how it necessa- 

 rily arises out of developing life. Instinct, too, Mr. Bain prefixes to 

 his analysis of ideas ; Mr. Spencer evolves it out of reflex action. 

 With the increasing complexity of experience Memory arises, and 

 Mill's " insoluble problem" is solved. The chapter on Reason is, per- 

 haps, the finest synthetic exposition in the literature of Psychology. 

 Reason, like Memory, is shown to be developed by an insensible tran- 

 sition out of instinct ; and Locke is reconciled with Kant by the inter- 

 vention of that theory of the secular transmission of mental acquisi- 

 tions which has become so familiar that it is now difficult to appre- 

 ciate its daring originality. Feeling, like Reason, arises out of in- 

 stinct ; and emotions of the greatest complexity, power, and abstract- 

 ness, are formed out of the simple aggregation of large groups of emo- 

 tional states into still larger groups through endless past ages. Thus 

 out of the feeble beginnings of life have been woven all the manifesta- 

 tions of mind, up to the highest abstractions of a Hegel and the infi- 

 nitely complex and voluminous emotions of a Beethoven. Well may a 

 French writer say : " Si on la rapproche par la pensee des tentatives 

 de Locke et de Condillac sur ce sujet, la genese sensualiste paraitra 

 d'une simplicite enfantine." ^ 



Hitherto the psychologist, proceeding objectively, has made no use 

 of consciousness ; and it is now necessary, in order to justify the find- 

 ings of the synthetic method, to examine consciousness in the only 

 possible way — by analysis. Setting out with the highest conceivable 

 display of mind, compound quantitative reasoning, he tracks all the 

 mental phenomena down to that which is 0}il^ a change in conscious- 

 ness, the establishment of the relation of sequence, and proves that 

 the genesis of intelligence has advanced in the same way as was shown 

 in the synthesis — by the establishment and consolidation of relations 

 of increasing complexity. Thus throughout all the phenomena of 

 1 Ribot, " La Psychologie Anglaise," p. 215. 



