ON ANCIENT AND MODERN SKEPTICS. 



371 



as regularly as in a common fiddle, through the whole extent of its diapason ; 

 and the orator who understands his art, may be said, without a figure, to play 

 skilfully upon the brains of his auditors. The hypothesis, however, is inge- 

 nious and elegant, and has furnished us with a variety of detached hints of 

 great value ; but it labours under the following fatal objections : First, the 

 nervous fibres have little or no elasticity belonging to them, less so perhaps 

 than any other animal fibres whatever; and next, while it supposes a soul 

 distinct from the brain, it leaves it no office to perform : for the medullary 

 vibrations are not merely causes of sensations, ideas, and associations, but 

 in fact the sources of reason, belief, imagination, mental passion, and all other 

 intellectual operations whatever. 



Admitting, therefore, the full extent of this hypothesis, still it gives us no 

 information about the nature of the mind and its proper functions ; and leaves 

 us just as ignorant as ever of the power by which it perceives the qualities of 

 external objects. The difficulty was felt by many of the advocates for the 

 associate system, especially by Priestley and Darwin; and itwas no sooner felt 

 than it was courageously attacked, and in their opinion completely overcome. 

 Nothing was clearer to them than that Dr. Hartley had overloaded his system 

 with machinery : that no such thing as a mind was wanting distinct from the 

 brain or sensory itself: that ideas, to adopt the language of Darwin, are the 

 actual contractions, motions, or configurations of the fibres which constitute the 

 immediate organ of sense, and consequently material things ;* or, to adopt 

 the language of Priestley, that ideas are just as divisible as the archetypes 

 or external objects that produce them ; and, consequently, like other parts 

 of the material frame, may be dissected, dried, pickled, and packed up, like 

 herrings, for home-consumption or exportation, according as the foreign or 

 domestic market may have the largest demand for them. And consequently, 

 also, that the brain or censory, or the train of material ideas that issue from 

 it, is the soul itself; not a fine-spun flimsy immaterial soul or principle of 

 thought, like that of Berkeley or even of Hume, existing unconnectedly in 

 the vast solitude of universal space, but a solid, substantial, alderman-like 

 soul, a real spirit of animation, fond of good cheer and good company ; that 

 enters into all the pursuits of the body while alive, and partakes of one com- 

 mon fate in its dissolution. 



If there be too much crassitude in this modification of materialism, as has 

 generally been supposed, even by materialists themselves, there is at least 

 something tangible in it : something that we can grasp and cope with, and fix 

 and understand ; which is more, I fear, than can be said of those subtle and 

 more complicated modifications of the same substrate, which have somewhat 

 more lately been brought forward in France to supply its place, and which 

 represent the human fabric as a duad, or even a triad of unities, instead of a 

 mixed or simple unity ; as a combination! of a corruptible life within a cor- 

 ruptible life two or three deep, each possessing its own separate faculties or 

 manifestations, but covered with a common outside. 



This remark more especially applies to the philosophers of the French 

 school; and particularly to the system of Dumas|, as modified by Bichat: 

 under which more finished form man is declared to consist of a pair of 

 lives, each distinct and coexistent, under the names of an organic and an 

 animal life ; with two distinct assortments of sensibilities, an unconscious and 

 a conscious. Each of these lives is limited to a separate set of organs, runs 

 its race in parallel steps with the other; commencing coetaneously and 

 perishing at the same moment."^ This work appeared at the close of the 

 past century ; was read and admired by most physiologists ; credited by 

 many ; and became the popular production of the day. Within ten or twelve 

 years, however, it ran its course, and was as generally either rejected or for- 

 gotten even in France ; and M. Richerand first, and M. Magendie since, have 

 thought themselves called upon to modify Bichat, in order to render him 

 more palatable, as Bichat had already modified Dumas. Under the last series 



• Zoon. vol. i. p. 11, edit. 3 f Study of Med. vo). iv. p 41—45, edit. 2. 



t Principee de Phyaiologie, torn. iv. 8vo. Paris, 1800—3. § Recherches sur la Vie et la Mort, &c. 



Aa2 



