520 PROFESSOR ALISON ON THE BELIEF 
it denotes.” —(Zectures, vol. ii., p. 47.) And he made a very ingenious attempt 
(such as Dr Rem, from his expressions above quoted, I think, must have approved) 
to explain how the notion of the primary qualities of matter may be gradually 
formed, by the help of experience, in the mind. 
« Perception,” he says, ‘is only another name for certain associations and 
inferences which flow from other more general principles of the mind.”—(Vol. i., 
p 569.) He then goes on to explain how, by means of certain sensations, and 
particularly of those muscular sensations, consequent on the excitement of in- 
stinctive and voluntary muscular actions, which he has so ingeniously illus- 
trated, the notion of the qualities of matter may be gradually introduced into the 
human mind. He distinguishes the Primary Qualities of Matter, I think, more 
satisfactorily than Rem, or perhaps any other author has done, as the different 
modifications of Extension and Resistance ; “ the very notion of which combined,” 
he says, “ seems necessarily to indicate a material cause, or rather, is truly that 
which constitutes our very notion of Matter.”—(Vol. i., p. 574.) 
I am much inclined to think, although I would not state it as certain, that his 
very ingenious analysis of the mental acts suggesting this notion, qs 77 zs often sug- 
gested,—i. e., regarding it as the natural result of muscular sensations, repeatedly 
excited, and again obstructed, in different degrees, at different points, and for diferent 
periods of time,—is correct ; if so, it affords as good an example as can be given, of 
what his friend Mr Campsett called “the mysterious, and almost miraculous 
subtilty of his mind.” But I maintain with confidence, that it does not in the 
slightest degree invalidate the statement of Rep, as to the Belief which accom- 
panies this act of the mind being a case of that Intuitive Perception of Truth, 
which we have seen that Brown, equally as Rerp, admitted as the foundation of 
all knowledge and all reasoning; and that for two reasons :— 
First, Dr Brown expressly admits, that the perception of the primary qua- 
lities of matter may take place without any such process of repeated muscular con- 
traction and reasoning thereupon ; and that it does so in the lower animals, in 
whom the very first complex act of perception may often be observed to be i- 
stantaneous, and yet perfect, and its suggestions correct. ‘“ The calf and the lamb,” 
he says, “ newly dropt into the world, seem to measure forms and distances with 
their eyes almost as distinctly as the human reason measures them after all the 
acquisitions of his long and helpless infancy.” —(Vol. ii., p. 70.) 
The well-known observation of the chicken and the spider shews that, in other 
classes of the lower animals, this primitive instinct, or suggestion, as he calls it, 
is still more obvious. It is therefore, as he states it, only a question of observa- 
tion and experiment, whether or not, in man as in other animals, Nature does 
communicate information by intuitive suggestion consequent on sensation,—which 
is neither contained in, nor logically deducible from, the sensation, but is, never- 
theless, correct. 
“a 
