216 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



did not only imply that the world of our senses supplies 

 all the material for reflection and thought and the great 

 development of abstract ideas, but also secondly, that this 

 totality of sensations consists of separate elements into 

 which it can be broken up, and out of which it can be put 

 together again in the same way as we put together in 

 chemistry physical bodies out of their elements. The 

 first of these two aspects has been adopted by all the 

 representatives of the empirical school, and also by those 

 philosophers who make a definite distinction between the 

 matter and the form of thought. But the second way 

 of putting the truth which was implied in the sensational 

 theory of knowledge led to a kind of atomism of thought, 

 to what John Stuart Mill called a mental chemistry. We 

 may say that the rigid views of the older faculty psy- 

 chology were opposed in the German school of Herbart 

 by emphasising the conflict and movement of ideas, these 

 being conceived in analogy with mechanical forces, and 

 that it was on the other side opposed in the English school 

 of Hartley and James Mill by the attempt to show how 

 the higher and more complex ideas were compounded out 

 of simpler elements by the various processes of associa- 

 tion.^ The agency, however, which brought about this 



1 Prof. Stout in his analysis of psychological investigation ; with 



Herbart's psychology has some 

 valuable remarks as to the differ- 

 ence between the German and the 

 British ways of approaching the 

 subject. One of the principal dif- 

 ferences lies in the much greater 

 importance and prominence which 

 both Herbart and Beneke, especially 

 the former, attached to the unity 

 of consciousness or of the soul. This 



contemporaneous British thinkers 

 it is kept in the background, or 

 rather implied. For Brown, "the 

 unity of the mind is rather an 

 abstract unity excluding difl'erence, 

 than a concrete unity including and 

 connecting differences. Herbart 

 also regarded the soul as a unity 

 excluding difference. He even held 

 this doctrine in a more rigid and 



characteristic of the inner life stands ' uncompromising form than any 

 with Herbart in the foreground of other philosopher" ('Mind,' If " 



