590 LOGIC OF THE MOEAL SCIENCES. 



mental and physical facts, between the internal and the external world, 

 will always remain, as a matter of classification ; and in that classification, 

 sensations, like all other feelings, must be ranked as mental phenomena. 

 The mechanism of their production, both in the body itself and in what is 

 called outward nature, is all that can with any propriety be classed as 

 physical. 



The phenomena of mind, then, are the various feelings of our nature, 

 both those improperly called physical and those peculiarly designated as 

 mental ; and by the laws of mind, I mean the laws according to which 

 those feelings generate one another. 



§ 2. All states of mind are immediately caused either by other states of 

 mind, or by states of body. When a state of mind is produced by a state 

 of mind, I call the law concerned in the case a law of Mind. When a state 

 of mind is produced directly by a state of body, the law is a law of Body, 

 and belongs to physical science. 



With regard to those states of mind which are called sensations, all are 

 agreed that these have for their immediate antecedents, states of body. 

 Every sensation has for its proximate cause some affection of the portion 

 of our frame called the nervous system, whether this affection originates 

 in the action of some external object, or in some pathological condition ox 

 the nervous organization itself. The laws of this portion of our nature — 

 the varieties of our sensations, and the physical conditions on which they 

 proximately depend — manifestly belong to the province of Physiology. 



Whether the remainder of our mental states are similarly dependent on 

 physical conditions, is one of the vexatm qiiestiones in the science of hu- 

 man nature. It is still disputed whether our thoughts, emotions, and vo- 

 litions are generated through the intervention of material mechanism; 

 whether we have organs of thought and of emotion, in the same sense in 

 which we have organs of sensation. Many eminent physiologists hold the 

 affirmative. These contend that a thought (for example) is as much the 

 result of nervous agency, as a sensation ; that some particular state of our 

 nervous system, in particular of that central ])ortion of it called the brain, 

 invariably precedes, and is presupposed by, every state of our conscious- 

 ness. According to this theory, one state of mind is never really produced 

 by another: all are produced by states of body. When one thought seems 

 to call up another by association, it is not really a thought which recalls a 

 thought; the association did not exist between the two thoughts, but be- 

 tween the two states of the brain or nerves which preceded the thoughts : 

 one of those states recalls the other, each being attended in its passage by 

 the particular state of consciousness which is consequent on it. On this 

 theory the uniformities of succession among states of mind would be mere 

 derivative uniformities, resulting from the laws of succession of the bodi- 

 ly states which cause them. There would be no original mental laws, no 

 Laws of Mind in the sense in which I use the term, at all; and mental 

 science would be a mere branch, though the highest and most recondite 

 branch, of the science of physiology. M. Comte, accordingly, claims the 

 scientific cognizance of moral and intellectual phenomena exclusively for 

 physiologists ; and not only denies to Psychology, or Mental Philosophy 

 properly so called, the character of a science, but places it, in the chimer- 

 ical nature of its objects and pretensions, almost on a par with astrology. 



Butflfeter all has been said which can be said, it remains incontestable 

 that there exist uniformities of succession among states of mind, and that 



