PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 73 



points of view, profitable, but it would be a very laborious task to 

 attempt the critical discussion of his argument. It must suffice, for 

 my present purpose, to point out that two of the fundamental as- 

 sumptions upon which that argument is based are wholly undemon- 

 strated. The first assumption is, that mind is itself a force; 42 the 

 second, that mind cannot be conscious of itself, but only of the 

 external world.* 3 



If I could bring myself to believe that mind is, in any proper 

 sense of the word, a force, and that such popular metaphorical ex- 

 pressions as mental force or mental energy accurately described the 

 phenomena, I should certainly expect to find at least some shadow 

 of proof for Mr. Herbert Spencer's assertion, that mental opera- 

 tions fall within the great generalization of the correlation and 

 equivalence of the forces. On the contrary, however, you will find, 

 on reading his lucid periods, that his whole argument relates to 

 those physical conditions in the organs of sense and in the muscular 

 and nervous systems, which are the antecedents of perception — 

 which are, in fact, the things really perceived — and in no sense 

 constitute the perceiving mind. Between strictly mental phenom- 

 ena and the physical forces no one has as yet even attempted to 

 establish a numerical equivalent ; nay, more, the correlation of 

 thought with the physical forces is not only undemonstrated, it is 

 utterly unthinkable. You can conceive several different ways, it 

 matters not whether true or false, in which the motions we know 

 as heat might be converted into those we know as light, and so on 

 with the other physical forces ; but you cannot represent mentally 

 any intelligible scheme by which any of the physical forces can be 

 converted into the simplest or most elementary thought. 



As to the question of self-consciousness, it seems as if the great 

 philosopher were reasoning in a circle. He first assumes that the 

 fundamental condition of all consciousness is the antithesis between 

 subject and object, — which is true only with regard to conscious- 

 ness of perception, the form of consciousness by which we become 

 acquainted with the non ego, — and then he concludes that there can 

 be no consciousness of the ego because it cannot fulfil these con- 

 ditions. That is, in a word, he denies consciousness of the ego, 

 because it is not consciousness of the non ego. Really it appears 

 to me that, as against such a philosophy as this it is not amiss to 

 appeal to "the unsophisticated sense of mankind," of which Mr. 

 Mansel speaks. 44 But there is fortunately a better philosophy than 



