Then follows a series of some of his most brilliant achievements. Former philosophers have been at considerable pains in enumerating and describing various intellectual powers, such as Conception, Memory, Recollection, Fancy, Imagination, Habit, and the like. Dr Brown proposes to show, that this variety of powers is unnecessarily and unphilosophically devised, and would reduce them to the principle of simple suggestion; or, at least, to this simple principle, in combination with some of those other principles, which were pointed out, as parts of our mental constitution, in his arrangement of the phenomena of mind.

First, the Power of Conception, so called, where the perception of one object excites the notion of some absent object, he allows to belong to the mind; but he maintains that this is the very function, which is meant by the power of suggestion itself, and that if the conception be separated from the suggestion, nothing will remain to constitute the power of suggestion, which is only another name for the same power. There is not, in any case of suggestion, both a suggestion and a conception, more than there is, in any case of vision, both a vision and sight. What one glance is to the capacity of vision, one conception is to the capacity of suggestion. We may see innumerable objects in succession; we may conceive innumerable objects in succession. But we see them, because we are susceptible of vision; we conceive them, because we have that susceptibility of spontaneous suggestion, by which conceptions arise after each other in regular trains.

The next supposed intellectual power, to which he calls our attention, is the power of memory. This, he maintains, is not a distinct, intellectual faculty, but is merely a suggestion, and a feeling of relation, the relation of priority in time. When we think of a house, without any relation to former time, or any other relation, we have only a simple suggestion of it; but when we think of it as the abode where we formerly lived, the suggestion receives the name of memory. Now, between the power of simple suggestion and the general power of feeling relations, hereafter to be considered, what becomes of such a faculty as Memory? It vanishes before this analytical magic of Dr Brown.

So Recollection, which is conceived to be a kind of voluntary memory, and particularly under our control, he reduces

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to 'the coexistence of some vague and indistinct desire with our simple trains of suggestion.' As long as the desire of remembering a particular event or object continues to exist, a variety of suggestions, more or less directly connected with the event or object, spontaneously arise in the mind, until we either obtain, at last, the remembrance which we wish, or, by some new suggestion, are led into a new channel of thought, and forget altogether that there was anything which we wished to remember.

Next, Imagination is reduced to its component elements. The momentary groups of images that arise, independently of any desire or choice on our part, and arise in almost every minute to almost every mind, constitute by far the greater number of our imaginations. Here is evidently only a process of simple suggestion. But there are cases in which desire, or intention of some sort, accompanies the whole, or the chief part of the process, and it is of these cases chiefly that we are accustomed to think, in speaking of this supposed power. By Imagination, in the common use of the word, is meant, the creative power of the imagination. But is even this a separate and peculiar faculty of the mind? The following is the process by which the author shows that it is not. First, there arises to the mind of any given Imaginer some conception, or simple suggestion of a particular subject; next, this subject excites in him a desire of producing by it some beautiful or interesting result. This desire, like every other vivid feeling, has a degree of permanence, which our vivid feelings only possess; and, by its permanence, tends to keep the accompanying conception of the subject, which is the object of the desire, also permanent before us; and while it is thus permanent, the usual spontaneous suggestions take place; conception following conception, in rapid but relative series, and our judgment, all the time, approving and rejecting, according to these relations of fitness and unfitness to the subject, which it perceives in parts of the train.

Such is the author's picture of the state, or successive states of the mind in the formation of every species of production, which goes by the name of a work of imagination. It is not, he insists, the exercise of a single power, but the development of various susceptibilities, of desire, of simple suggestion by which conceptions rise after conceptions, of judg

ment or relative suggestion, by which a feeling of relative fitness or unfitness arises, on the contemplation of the conceptions that have thus spontaneously presented themselves. The results of this process will, of course, be different in value according to the constitution of different minds, and also according to the various influences of those secondary laws of suggestion, which were before pointed out as modifying the primary. In the mind of inventive genius, conceptions follow each other, chiefly according to the relations of analogy, which are infinite, and therefore admit of constant novelty; while in the humbler mind, the prevailing tendencies of suggestion are those of former contiguity of objects in place and time, which are, of course, limited, and by their very nature, limited to conceptions, that cannot confer on the mind in which they arise the honor of originality. The forty second Lecture, containing the full development and illustration of the foregoing principles, is one of the finest, one of the most interesting in the series. Imagination and Fancy seem to be used throughout as synonymous, or at least with no attempt at distinguishing them. Where the author endeavors to show the spiritual mechanism, as it were, by which, in conducting a work of imagination, some images are selected in preference to others, the train of discussion is peculiar to himself, and contains a full condensation of some of his most original doctrines.

The next Lecture contains two very curious speculations, in opposition to the doctrine that Habit is an ultimate and peculiar law of the mind, and explaining all its phenomena by the mere operation of simple suggestion; after which, the absurdity and incompetency of the Hartleian system of vibrations and vibratiuncles are in various ways exposed and refuted.

We now proceed to describe the other class of internal affections of the mind, comprehending our feelings of relative suggestion, that is, all our feelings of relation. There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the intervention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, when external objects are present, and have produced a certain affection

of our sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementary feelings of perception. These relations we recognise both among external objects and our mental feelings of every kind, and they are divided by our author into two general classes. We perceive relations among them as they coexist at any given instant in groups, without any reference to succession in time. Thus, you feel that the one half of four is to twelve, as twelve is to seventy two, and you feel this, merely by considering the numbers together, without any regard to time. No notion of change or succession is involved in it. This is the first general class of relations. Next, we perceive relations among objects and among our feelings, considered with reference to time, as successive. Thus you perceive the relation of effect and cause, between the bloom of summer and the warmth of its sky.

The first of our classes of relations, those of which the subjects are regarded without reference to time, are subdivided into five different kinds. First, there is the relation of position. Mark the furniture standing about your room; one article on your right, another a little farther on, another directly opposite, and so forth. Secondly, the relation of resemblance or of difference. Observe in your path two flowers of the same tints and forms, or of different smells. Thirdly, the relation of proportion. Think of the equality between two virticle angles formed by two straight lines, which cut one another; of the pairs of numbers-four, six,-five, twentyand your mind exists immediately in that state, which constitutes the feeling of proportion. Fourthly, the relation of degree. Listen to one voice, and then to a voice which is louder; smell one flower, and then another which is more or less fragrant. Fifthly, the relation of comprehension. Consider a house and its different apartments; a tree, and its branches, stems, and foliage; a horse, and its limbs, trunk, head, and you have the feeling of the relation of parts to one comprehensive whole. By some subtlety and refinement of analysis, these divisions might be made fewer, but they are sufficiently distinct for every purpose of arrangement.

Passing over the first of these five classes, the author directs our attention to the relation of resemblance. To this principle he ascribes all classification, and consequently every thing which is valuable in language. It is the use of general terms,

that is to say, of terms founded on the feeling of resemblance, which alone gives to language its power, enabling us to condense, in a single word, innumerable objects, which, individually, would be utterly impossible to be grasped by us in our conceptions. It would be unjust to refuse to Dr Brown a chaplet of glory for the masterly penetration with which he has treated the subject of general ideas, and the unrivalled degrees of light and simplicity diffused by him through dark, tangled difficulties, amid which all former philosophers, without exception, had been hopelessly groping. Time was, when, if we had wished to make a common man tremble, and a wise one appear foolishly profound, we could not have devised a more successful method, than to ask them how they would explain an abstract general notion. The very phrase is even now bewildering and distressing, in consequence of old associations involved with it. Yes, even now, when our admirable author has revealed to the world, what the world may well wonder it never clearly and scientifically knew before, though all, down to child and idiot, must have felt and practised upon it every day, that the feeling of similarity is that which constitutes a general notion. The perception of objects, the feeling of their resemblance in certain respects, the invention of a name for these circumstances of felt resemblance,—what can be more truly and readily conceivable than this process! And yet on this process, apparently so simple, has been founded all that controversy as to universals, which so long distracted the schools; and which, far more wonderfully, (for the distraction of the schools by a few unintelligible words scarcely can be counted wonderful,) continues still to perplex philosophers with difficulties, which themselves have made; difficulties, which they could not even have made to themselves, if they had thought for a single moment of the nature of that feeling of the relation of similarity, which we are now considering.' Lecture 45.

The point in dispute was shortly this. One party maintained, that besides all the objects which we can know individually, there are in existence certain universal forms comprehending whole classes of objects. What does the word triangle represent? Surely not a triangle of three equal sides only, nor one of two equal sides only, nor one merely of three unequal sides. If it signify anything, they contended, it