PHYSIOLOGY VERSUS METAPHYSICS. 257 



failure in solving the problems of mental philosophy be expected from 

 a system, even though that system were sustained by surpassing intel- 

 lectual force, that ignored the instrument, brain, by which the result, 

 mind, is evolved ? What success could be expected from an inquiry 

 into the mechanism of respiration, from which all consideration of the 

 structure, dynamics, and chemistry of the breathing-organs was pur- 

 posely excluded ? Conceive a man proceeding to investigate the re- 

 spiratory process who had never seen a lung ! Should we consider him 

 perfectly sane ? How ineffably curious, then, if not ludicrous, does it 

 seem to find Bain announcing, with in some sort the tone of a man 

 who has stumbled on a happy discovery, that it would be worth the 

 while of metaphysicians to learn something of nerves — we presume, 

 impliedly, something of brain also ! Still this niggard dole of ac- 

 knowledgment places the donor at all events in advance of J. S. Mill, 

 who to the very close of his career contemptuously and obtrusively 

 rejected cerebral physiology as a guide, of even the most subordinate 

 value, in the study of mind. Why, the solitary discovery of the con- 

 nection of aphasia with a special spot in a special gyrus of a special 

 hemisphere of the brain, taken in conjunction with the corollaries logi- 

 cally deducible from that connection, seems a far weightier offering 

 toward the elucidation of the actual mechanism of mind — of the con- 

 ditions under which Nature works — than all the transcendental guess- 

 work furnished by the toil of metaphysicians from Plato to Schopen- 

 hauer. 



Nevertheless, the conspicuous failure of purely introspective phi- 

 losophy, unaided by objective investigation, to establish its special 

 psychic doctrines, does not, on the other hand, disprove the possible 

 independent existence of soul as one of the factors of mind. Such ex- 

 istence may be, or may not be, a reality, for anything that metaphysics 

 show or do not show. The failure of transcendentalism, admitted 

 even by Kant, simply proves that in wisdom which is not of pure and un- 

 aided metaphysics lies such lingering hope, as an enthusiast may cling 

 to, of substantiating the reality and the nature of the soul's existence 

 and practical activity. Nor does the failure signify (whatever may 

 be its import as to the efficiency of transcendentalism) that introspec- 

 tion must not be allowed to play a large though far from the solitary 

 part in the attempt to elucidate the nature of mental operations. To 

 reject the help of introspection in analyzing the phenomena of mind 

 would be as illogical, nay fatuous, on the part of the physiologist as 

 the negation of the utility of all objective aid by the bulk of meta- 

 physicians. But in point of fact such rejection is a sheer impossi- 

 bility, for we can not cogitate without examining consciousness, and 

 when we do this we introspect. Besides, there are facts of mental op- 

 eration, and laws regulating these facts, which lie without the pale 

 of physiology as an objective factor, facts and laws which can only be 

 even guessed at by the analysis of self -consciousness. The results of 



TOL. XXV. — 1*7 



