to how it may be used. Such an examination is as likely to furnish a clever rogue as an honest, persevering, good man. Of course it is better than none, as it keeps the fools out, if it lets the knaves in.

When these views are appreciated they will lead to the introduction of the same reforms into our Prisons that have, with much labour, been introduced into our Lunatic Asylums, and upon precisely the same principlenamely, that the criminal is not responsible, and must be reformed with as little suffering as possible; and where reform, as in very many cases, is impossible, he must be sorted and caged as other wild animals are at the Zoological Gardens. "It is society prepares crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed."* Although Cerebral Physiology has almost stood still for the last 30 years, yet here and there we are not without evidence of a glimmering of light on this subject among physiologists. Thus Dr. Robert Bird says: "Men are great or little, good or bad, not by the influence of their schools and colleges, but in spite of them. at all, and are we to give it up? proper place and just weight in the general estimate. It is the oil to the wheels, and the varnish to the surface, but not the substance. It seems to me that we shall make little progress in the improvement of our race till we give our moral and mental philosophy a physiological foundation, instead of the metaphysical and sandy one upon which it now rests; till we judge and treat our brains as we now judge and treat our livers. There was a time when insanity was looked on as the work of a devil, and holy men were called on to exorcise him. Now, what should we think of a nation which believed and acted on such a doctrine in these days? We should pity it, and pronounce it plunged in barbarism and superstition.

Then is education of no avail
No, but let us give it its

* Quetelet.

But here we are asked what has vice to do with lunacy? What have they in common? My answer is, they are the same; they differ in degree, but they are the same in kind, and the sooner we admit and act on this, the better for ourselves. The phenomena of vice are as much the consequences of conditions of our tissues as are the phenomena of lunacy."

"Physiological Essays," p. 226,

CHAPTER IV.

PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS."

IN metaphysics each disputant has his own language, and all controversy ought to begin by mastering each other's dictionary. Let us begin, however, at the very beginning, and see if modern science has thrown any light on this subject.

Hume says: "We may observe that it is universally allowed by philosophers, and is, besides, pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions, or impressions, and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion. Now, since nothing is ever present to the mind but perception, and since all ideas are derived from something antecedent to the mind, it follows that it is impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of anything specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our ideas out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the utmost limit of the universe, we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can perceive any kind of existence but those perceptions which have appeared in that narrow compass."

This, however true, and, as Hume observes, now "universally allowed by philosophers," is not, however, true to common apprehension, which still believes in an external world, exactly as it appears, and knows nothing of consciousness, and that the objects of knowledge are in reality not things, but

*The substance of this Chapter has already appeared in the Anthropological Review for October, 1869.

DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

155

ideas. But if, as Hume says, "external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion", then we ought to be consistent in our inductions and deductions from this fact, and not attempt to raise whole systems on supposed knowledge beyond. We know nothing of Matter and Motion, of Spirit and Force; our own consciousness is all that is known to us, and all else is only more or less probable inference. Every external fact requires to be translated into the language of our thoughts; into our peculiar, and definite, and very limited "modes of thought." The longest chain of physical causation necessarily has its last link in the mind. The bridge to be built, or the road to be travelled, is not from physics to metaphysics, but from metaphysics to physics. The ego produces the non-ego. This, as I have said, is not the common apprehension: no doubt the first question is, What is the world without? The next, What am I? and thus on reflection we come to consider the medium or instrument by which the world becomes known to us, and which we call the mind, but which in reality is merely our consciousness. We ask, then, what is this consciousness? Whence comes it, or what is the cause of it? and lastly, What is the good of it—what is the use of it—what is the object of it? Here we have the questions of being or existence, of efficient cause or final cause, all questions of pure metaphysics, all requiring to be answered before physics can be properly pursued; for as we know of an external world only through the medium of our consciousness, how do we know that consciousness tells us truly, or to what extent its indications may be trusted?

We ask first, then, what is consciousness? It is a succession of varied feelings and ideas, and this only; differing, however, greatly in intensity. We call this variety of sentience by the names of sensation, propensity, sentiment, ideas, perception, conception, memory, imagination, and judgment. We speak of ideas and feelings passing through the mind,

but there is no evidence of their passing through anything. The aggregate of these ideas and feelings is the mind, and there is nothing else. Consciousness is supposed to be a general term denoting states of mind, but mind has no existence in itself, but consists of these "states", or stream, or succession of thoughts and feelings. Consciousness, and sentience or feeling, in one sense are the same; but what is generally meant by the term is self-consciousness, which is the action of one faculty upon another-that is, reflection on consciousness. With Dr. T. Brown and James Mill, to have a feeling, and to be conscious of that feeling, are the same things; and this may be said to be the case with animals generally, who have feelings, but do not attend to them; but with J. S. Mill it is one thing to have a feeling, and another to recognise and reflect upon it, and refer it to one's-self, and to the series that make up our sentient existence. Selfconsciousness probably requires another intuitional feeling besides reflection to be associated with the train of thought. It then induces us to refer all our states to the "I," or self, and is an element in our belief in personality.

But what do we know of consciousness? Being conscious and knowing are to us the same things. Consciousness in its several states of thought and feeling, of pleasure and pain, is the only real and absolute knowledge we have; all else is relative. Metaphysics we know; physics we only know in the relation to metaphysics, and as the facts and laws of physics are translated into ideas, the language of our consciousness. Phenomena and their laws are known to us but as parts of our consciousness. Much is said about observation and facts as opposed to mere thought in apparent forgetfulness of this truth, that every fact must become a thought before we can know it. All that may or may not be without ourselves, whatever properties such existences may possess, or whatever may be their real nature, all we know of