very different grounds. He, indeed, rejected it because he did not consider it at all a true psychological question; and we do the same. But further than this, we now give, what he never gave or dreamt of giving, the reason why it cannot be viewed as a psychological question; which reason is this, that the very phenomena themselves, inherent, or supposed to be inherent, in this entity, do not, properly speaking, or otherwise than in the most indirect manner possible, constitute any part of the facts of psychology, and therefore any discussion connected with them, or with the subject in which they may inhere, is a discussion extraneous and irrelevant to the real and proper science. Further, he rejected the question as one which was above the powers of man: we scout it as one which is immeasurably beneath them. He refused to acknowledge it because he considered the human faculties weakly incompetent to it: we scorn it, because, knowing what the true business and aim of psychology is, we consider it miserably incompetent to them. In short, we pass it by with the most supreme indifference. Let the metaphysician, then, retain "the human mind" if he will, and let him make the most of it. Let him regard it as the general complement of all the phenomena alluded to. Let him consider it their subject of inherence if he pleases, and he will find that there is no danger of our quarrelling with him about that. We will even grant it to be a convenient generic term expressing the sum-total of the sensations, passions, intellectual states, &c., by which the human being is visited.
But the metaphysician does not stop here. He will not be satisfied with this admission. He goes much further, and demands a much greater concession. By "mind" he does not
statement that these phenomena do inhere in matter. In struggling to supply us with more than this, his reason is strangled in the trammels of an inexorable petitio principii, from which it cannot shake itself loose: while the materialist looks on perfectly quiescent. All this, however, Mr Stewart totally misconceives. He speaks as if the materialist (of course we mean such as understand and represent the argument rightly) took, or were called upon to take, an active part in this discussion. He imagines that the onus probandi, the task of proving the phenomena to inhere in matter, and of disproving "mind," lay upon his shoulders. He talks of the "scheme of materialism" (Elements, p. 4), as if the scheme of materialism, supposing that there is one, did not exist, merely because the scheme of immaterialism cannot, as we have seen, bring itself into existence. If the immaterialist cannot (as we have proved he cannot, logically) set up the entity of mind as a habitation for certain houseless phenomena, will he not permit the materialist charitably to give them shelter in the existing entity of matter? Surely this is a stretch of philosophical intolerance, on the part of the immaterialist, not to be endured. He cannot house these phenomena himself, nor will he permit others to house them. Before concluding this note, which has already run too far, we may point out to the logical student another instance of Mr Stewart's vicious logic contained in the paragraph referred to. We will be short "Mind and matter," says he, "considered as objects of human study, are essentially different,"—that is, are different in their essence. Now turn to the last line of this paragraph, and read—"We are totally ignorant of the essence of either." That is to say, being totally ignorant of the essence of two things, we are yet authorised in saying that these two things are essentially different, or different in their essence. Now, difference being in the opinion of most people the condition of knowledge, or, in other words, our knowledge of a thing being based upon the difference observed between it and other things, and our ignorance of a thing being generally the consequence of its real or apparent identity with other things, it appears to us that our ignorance of the essence of these two things (if it did not altogether disqualify us from speaking) should rather have induced us to say that they were essentially the same; or, at any rate, could never justify us in predicating their essential difference as Mr Stewart has done. If we know nothing at all about their essence, how can we either affirm or deny anything with respect to that essence? From all that we have here said, it will not be inferred by any rational thinker that we are a materialist, and just as little that we are an immaterialist. In point of fact we are neither; and if the reader does not understand how this can be, we can only explain it by repeating that we regard the whole question in itself as silly and frivolous in the extreme, and only worthy of notice as marking certain curious windings of thought in the history of logic.
