536 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



"The sensations which form the elements of all knowledge are 

 received either simultaneously or successively ; when several are 

 received simultaneously, as the smell, the taste, the color, the form, 

 &c., of a fruit, their association together constitutes our idea of an 

 object; when received successively, their association makes up the 

 idea of an event. Anything, then, which favors the associations of 

 synchronous ideas, will tend to produce a knowledge of objects, a 

 perception of qualities ; while anything which favors association in the 

 successive order, will tend to produce a knowledge of events, of the 

 order of occuri'ences, and of the connexion of cause and eifect : in 

 other words, in the one case a perceptive mind, with a discriminative 

 feeling of the pleasurable and painful properties of things, a sense of 

 the grand and the beautiful, will be the result : in the other, a mind 

 attentive to the movements and phenomena, a ratiocinative and philo- 

 sophic intellect. Now it is an acknowledged principle, that all sensa- 

 tions experienced during the presence of any vivid impression, become 

 strongly associated with it, and with each other ; and does it not follow, 

 that the synchronous feelings of a sensitive constitution (/.e. the one 

 which has vivid impressions) will be more intimately blended than in 

 a differently formed mind 1 If this suggestion has any foundation in 

 truth, it leads to an inference not unimportant; that where nature has 

 endowed an individual with great original susceptibility, he will proba- 

 bly be distinguished by fondness for natural history, a relish for the 

 beautiful and great, and moral enthusiasm ; where there is but a 

 mediocrity of sensibility, a love of science, of abstract truth, with a 

 deficiency of taste and of fervor, is likely to be the result." 



We see from this example, that when the general laws of mind are 

 more accurately known, and above all, more skillfully applied to the 

 detailed explanation of mental peculiarities, they will account for many 

 more of those peculiarities than is ordinarily supposed. I by no means 

 seek to imply from this that they will account for all ; but that which 

 remains to be otherwise accounted for is merely a residual phenomenon ; 

 and the amount of the residue can only be determined by persons already 

 familiar with the expla,nation of phenomena by psychological laws. 



On the other hand, it is equally clear that when physiologists, taking 

 into account the whole animal creation, attempt, by a judicious appli- 

 cation of the Method of Concomitant Variations, grounded chiefly on 

 extreme cases, to establish a connexion between the strength of differ- 

 ent mental propensities or capacities and the proportional or absolute 

 magnitudes of different regions of the brain ; the evidences which are 

 or may be produced in support of this pretension, ought to be taken 

 into serious consideration by psychologists. Nor will this part of the 

 science of mind be ever cleared up, until those evidences shall be not 

 only sifted and analyzed, but, when necessary, added to and completed, 

 by persons sufficiently versed in psychological laws to be capable of 

 discriminating how much of each phenomenon such laws will suffice to 

 explain. 



Even admitting the influence of cerebral conformation to be as gi-eat 

 as is contended for, it would still be a question how far the cerebral 

 development determined the propensity itself, and how far it only acted 

 by modifying the nature and degree of the sensations on which the 

 propensity may be psychologically dependent. And it is certain that, 

 an human beings at least, differences in education and in outward cir- 



