44 



NATURE 



\Nov. 19, 1874 



hope of seeing a second edition with a supplementary 

 volume of plates. 



In a brief and imperfect notice like the 'present but 

 scanty justice can be done to a book like the " Pharma- 

 cojraphia," a work which, from the amount of its original 

 matter, the laborious verification of its facts, the accuracy 

 of its references, and the extent of general erudition it 

 reveals, will be received with no grudging welcome, and 

 will be recognised at once and without misgiving as the 

 standard of authority on the subjects of which it treats. 

 Henry B. Brady 



SULLY'S '■■ SENSATION AND INTUITION" 



Sc'nsation and Inluition : Studies in Psycholo.;\' and 

 ALstlietics. By James Sully, M.A. (Henry S. King 

 and Co.) 



A YOUNG aspirant to the woolsack had as part of 

 his first examination the question, " To whom was 

 the Declaration of Rights presented?" To refresh his 

 memory he cast his eyes on the paper of the gentleman 

 on his lc(t, who had written William I. ; wilUng to give 

 himself every advantage, he next stole a glance at the 

 paper of the gentleman on his right, where he saw William 

 III. " Ah ! " thought he, with a knowing twinkle of the 

 eye, " I'll strike the happy medium " — and down went 

 William II. Mr. Sully, in the first of this collection of 

 interesting essays, has struck the happy medium between 

 the evolution and the individual experience psychologies. 

 Mr. Sully has read and pondered all the learning of 

 his subject ; but the thoroughgoing evolutionist is not 

 unlikely to accuse him of having done more than " shaded 

 for a moment the intellectual eye from the dazzling liglit 

 of the new idea." If, as we are told, '"it is far from 

 improbable that a fuller investigation of the processes by 

 which our conceptions of space are built up, will render 

 superfluous the supposition of their innateness," it is not 

 at all probable that any other conceptions arc inherited. 

 And the evolutionist will not, we fear, be able to draw 

 much comfort from the assurance that " the psychologist, 

 when satisfied of the presence of distinct mental pheno- 

 mena not traceable to the action of his own laws, will 

 gratefully avail himself of the additional hypothesis 

 supplied to him by the philosopher of evolution ; " for it 

 not unfrequenlly is very difficult indeed to satisfy the 

 psychologist of the presence of anything not traceable to 

 the operation of his own laws. An authority in psychology 

 writing in " Chambers's Encyclopaedia," says that the 

 assertions with regard to the instinctive perceptions of 

 distance and direction by the newly hatched chick are, 

 "in the present state of our acquaintance with the laws of 

 mind, wholly incredible." We now know that the chick 

 has not the least respect for those laws of mind ; and we 

 have already in these columns (Naturit, vok vii. p. 300) 

 argued that we have no sufficiently accurate acquaintance 

 with the alleged acquisitions of infancy to justify the 

 doctrine that they are different in kind from the unfolding 

 of the inherited instincts of the chicken. To what we 

 then said Dr. Carpenter has replied on one point in his 

 "Mental Physiology " (p. 179). While admitting that 

 human beings require no education to enable them " to 

 recognise the direction of any luminous object," he 



maintains "that the acquirement of the power of visually 

 guiding the muscular movements is experiential in the 

 case of the human infant." In support of this somewhat 

 inconsistent position, he gives facts within his own 

 knowledge which we do not feel to be in the least inimical 

 to the doctrine against which they are arrayed. Mr. 

 Sully is more consistent ; he thinks it proveable that the 

 eye has no instinctive knowledge of either the distance 

 or the direction of a visual object. He relies greatly on 

 " Recent German Experiments with Sensation " (the sub- 

 ject of his third essay), which, like Dr. Carpenter's facts, 

 appear to us in perfect harmony with the theory they are 

 supposed to disprove Without doubt, there is no higher 

 scientific authority than Helmholtz, and just for this reason 

 is it specially instructive to observe how readily even he 

 accepts as statements of fact what never could have been 

 more than the suggestions of theory. In the last of his 

 admirable course of lectures on " The Recent Progress of 

 the Theory of Vision," he says : " The youn^ chicken very 

 soon pecks at grains of corn, but it pecked while it was 

 still in the shell, and when it hears the hen peck, it pecks 

 again, at first seemingly at random. Then, when it has 

 by chance hit upon a grain, 'it may, no doubt, learn to 

 notice the field of vision which is at the moment presented 

 to it." In this list of assertions, even the one that might 

 seem most certainly true is a mistake. The chicken does 

 not peck while still in the shell ; though that it does so 

 is, we believe, the universal opinion, the actual mode of 

 self-delivery having never been observed. The movement 

 is just the reverse of pecking. Instead of striking for- 

 ward and downward (a movement impossible on the part 

 of a bird packed in a shell with its head under its wing), 

 it breaks its way out by vigorously jerking its head 

 upward and backward, w'nile i: turns round within the 

 shell. With the advance of knowledge, theories will have, 

 though it may be reluctantly, to accommodate themselves 

 to facts ; and after the din of the battle is over, it will be 

 found that the real facts had never had any difference 

 among themselves. 



Mr. Sully differs from Mr. Spencer as to the relation of 

 the evolution hypothesis to the question of realism and 

 idealism. He is aware that Mr. Spencer "distinctly 

 affirms that the reality of an independent unknowable 

 force is necessarily involved in .his theory of evolutional 

 progress. But this," Mr. Sully observes, " can only mean 

 that every distinct conception of subject and object 

 involves this postulate ; and this assumption can hardly 

 fail to strike one as a pctitio principii, inasmuch as able 

 thinkers have undertaken to find the deepest significance 

 of this antithesis in purely phenomenal distinctions." 

 Perhaps Mr. Spencer might be able to produce instances 

 in which the facts of the universe have turned out not 

 exactly what able thinkers had undertaken to find them. 

 Considerable strain is put by Mr. Sully on Mr. Mill's 

 formidable definition of matter — that it is " a permanent 

 possibility of sensation ;'," but we greatly fear that when 

 brought to close quarters the idealist that puts his trust 

 in this verbal monstrosity will find himself left in the 

 lurch. Somehow through "processes of repeated experi- 

 ence and sharpened intellectual action, the mind comes," 

 we are told, "to conceive a possible impression as the 

 originating cause of a present one, and so to arrive at that 

 vast stream of objective events which flows on beyond, 



