my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right and wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had long been forgotten, then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity. . The length of time that was occupied with this deluge of ideas, or rather the shortness of time into which they were condensed, I cannot now state with precision: yet certainly two minutes could not have elapsed from the moment of suffocation to the time of my being hauled up."

In the Confessions of an Opium Eater (p. 261), De Quincey relates how, when dreaming under the influence of opium, he remembered things which, when waking, he could not have recognized as parts of his former experience, and remembered them with all the feelings of the original experience; and thereupon quotes a surmise that the book which shall be opened at the day of judgment is the everlasting roll of remembrance. "The minutest incidents of my childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them; for, if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all the evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantly. . . . . Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil. But alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil ; and they are waiting to be revealed, whenever the obscuring daylight itself shall have withdrawn." One is tempted to add the question from Blanco White's Sonnet:—

"If Light may thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

7 (p. 41).—“It is to be regretted that he (Dugald Stewart) had not studied (he even treats it as inconceivable) the Leibnitzian doctrine of what has not been well denominated obscure perceptions or ideas-that is, acts and affections of mind, which, manifesting their existence in their effects, are themselves out of consciousness or apperception. The fact of such latent mental modifications is now established beyond all rational doubt; and on the supposition of

their reality, we are able to solve various psychological phenomena otherwise inexplicable. Among these are many of those attributed to habit." (Sir W. Hamilton, in his edition of Reid, p. 551.)

66 'Daraus, dass die Seele des Gedankens sich nicht bewusst sei, folge noch gar nicht, dass sie zu denken auf höre." (Neue Versuche üb. d. menschlich. Verstand. B. ii.

"Ich sehe nicht," says Leibnitz, again, "dass die Cartesianer jemals beweisen haben oder beweisen können, dass jede Vorstellung von Bewusstsein begleitet ist." And again :-"Darin nämlich haben die Cartesianer sehr gefehlt, dass sie die Vorstellungen, deren man sich nicht bewusst ist, für nichts rechneten. Das war auch der Grund, warum sie glaubten, dass nur die Geiste onaden waren, und dass es keine Seelen der Thiere oder andere Entelechien gebe.”— Leibnitz als Denker. Auswahl seiner kleinern Aufsätze. By G. Schelling. Pp. 108 and 115.

He was the first to assert the existence of "unconscious perceptions or ideas," and he assigned them a high importance. The phrase may seem paradoxical, but the contradiction is perhaps only apparent. For if we only know what we are conscious of, and know nothing of which we are not conscious, what right have we to declare of the existence which we know by or in consciousness, that it can have no existence out of consciousness? "Vorstellungen zu haben, und sich ihrer doch nicht bewusst zu sein, darin scheint ein Widerspruch zu liegen. Allein wir können uns doch mittelbar bewusst sein, eine Vorstellung zu haben, ob wir gleich unmittelbar uns ihrer nicht bewusst sein."-KANT, Anthropologie. Quoted by Hartmann Philosophie des Unbewussten. Vol. i. p. 13.

Fichte, in his Bestimmung des Menschen-" In jedem Momente ihrer Dauer ist die Natur ein zusummenhängendes Ganze; in jedem Momente muss jeder einzelne Theil derselbe so sein wie er ist, weil alle übrigen sind wie sie sind; und du könntest kein Sandkörnchen von seiner Stelle verrücken, ohne dadurch vielleicht alle Theile des unermesslichen Ganzen hindurch etwas zu verändern. Aber jeder Moment dieser Dauer ist bestimmt durch alle abgelaufenen Momente, und wird bestimmen alle künftigen Momente, und du kannst in dem gegenwärtigen keines Sandkörne Lage anders denken als sie ist, ohne dass du genöthigt würdest die ganze Vergangenheit ins Unbestimmte hinauf, und die ganze Zukunft ins Unbestimmte herab dir anders zu denken."-Sämmtliche Werke, ii. 178.

It is only right to add, that the fullest exposition of unconscious mental action is to be found in Beneke's works. A summary of his views is contained in his Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft.

8 (p. 69).—I leave this note as it stood in the first edition (1867). Then the criticism was thought by some to be hardly just; indeed, it has not escaped censure. There are few persons, I suspect, who would not endorse it now in its application to Mill.

Since this chapter was written, and, indeed, separately published, Mr. J. S. Mill has made a powerful defence of the so-called Psychological Method. In his criticism of Comte in the Westminster Review for April 1865, and in his "Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy," he has said all that can be said in favour of the Psychological Method, and has done what could be done to disparage the Physiological Method. This he had already done many years ago in the second volume of his "System of Logic," and he is now only consistent in returning to the charge. Nevertheless, the admirers of Mr. Mill may well experience regret to see him serving with so much zeal on what is a so desperately forlorn hope. Physiology seems never to have been a favourite study with Mr. Mill-in none of his writings does he exhibit any indications of being really acquainted with it; for it is hardly possible to conceive that any one having a knowledge of the present state of this science, would disparage it as he has done, and exalt so highly the psychological method of investigating mental phenomena. The wonder is, however, that he who has done so much to expound the system of Comte, and to strengthen and complete it, should on this question take leave of it entirely, and follow and laud a method of research which is so directly opposed to the method of positive science. Of course, I speak now strictly of the method, not of Comte's application of it in his unfounded phrenological speculations, which are scarcely less wild and absurd than his religious delirium appears to be. [Not really so wild as I rashly imagined-that comes of giving an opinion of an author without having read him properly.] However, though one may suspect Mr. Mill to be unfortunate in his ignorance, or entirely mistaken in his estimate, of the physiological method, one cannot fail to profit by the study of his arguments on behalf of the psychological method, and by his exposition of its merits. By parading the whole force of the reasons in favour of it, he has exhibited, not so much its strength as its weakness, and has undesignedly given important assistance to the physiological method. For the reasons why he has not been convincing, and why this chapter has been left unmodified, I may refer to the arguments set forth in a review of his "Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy" in the Journal of Mental Science for January 1866. "Mr. Mill," it is there said, "has a high opinion of the psychological method of inquiry into mental phenomena, and thinks Comte

Whether that be

to have committed a great error in discarding it. true or not is not the question now; we may admit it to be true, and still ask whether it is a sufficient reason for ignoring those important results of the physiological method of research which bear vitally on psychology; whether, in fact, because a certain method has some worth, it can therefore afford to dispense entirely with the aid furnished by other methods."

And again :-" The present complaint against Mr. Mill is that he takes no notice of the effects of recent scientific conceptions on the questions referred to philosophy; that he goes on exactly as he might have gone on if he had lived in the days of Aristotle; that at a time when a new method, highly fertile in fact and of more fruitful promise, was available, he persists in trying to do, by the old method, what Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and a host of others have not done. Now, we have not the slightest faith that ten thousand Mills will, following the same method, do what these great men have not done; but there can be no question that, had Mr. Mill chosen to avail himself of the new material and the new method, which his great predecessors had not in their day, he would have done what no other living man could have done."

CHAPTER II.

THE MIND AND THe nervoUS SYSTEM.

"That which perceives is a part of nature as truly as the objects of perception which act on it, and, as a part of nature, is itself an object of investigation purely physical. It is known to us only in the successive changes which constitute the variety of our feelings : but the regular sequence of these changes admits of being traced, like the regularity which we are capable of discovering in the successive organic changes of our bodily frame. There is a Physiology of the Mind, then, as there is a Physiology of the Body--a science which examines the phenomena of our spiritual part simply as phenomena, and from the order of their succession, or other circumstances of analogy, arranges them in classes under certain general names; as, in the physiology of our corporeal part, we consider the phenomena of a different kind which the body exhibits, and reduce all the diversities of these under the names of a few general Functions."-Sketch of a System of Philosophy of the Human Mind, by T. Brown, M.D.

THE crude proposition that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile has been the subject of much ridicule to those who have not received it with outcries of disapprobation and disgust.* Assuredly it is not an exact expression of the facts; one may rightly admit the brain to be the principal organ of mind without accepting the fallacious comparison of mental function.

"Nous concluons avec la même certitude que le cerveau digére en quelque sort les impressions; qu'il fait organiquement la sécrétion de la pensée.”—Rapport du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme, par P. J. G. Cabanis.