Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3) — John Shaqi
Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)Brown, Thomas
Philosophy
Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Vol. 1 of 3)
Brown, Thomas
Philosophy; Psychology
I have thus briefly sketched the various important inquiries, which
the philosophy of mind, in its most extensive sense, may be said to
comprehend. The nature of our spiritual being, as displayed in all
the phenomena of feeling and thought--the ties which bind us to our
fellow-men, and to our Creator--and the prospect of that unfading
existence, of which life is but the first dawning gleam; such are the
great objects to which in the department of your studies committed
to my charge, it will be my office to guide your attention and
curiosity. The short period of the few months to which my course is
necessarily limited, will not, indeed, allow me to prosecute, with such
full investigation as I should wish, every subject that may present
itself in so various a range of inquiry. But even these few months,
I flatter myself, will be sufficient to introduce you to all which
is most important for you to know in the science, and to give such
lights as may enable you, in other hours, to explore, with success,
the prospects that here, perhaps, may only have opened on your view.
It is not, I trust, with the labours of a single season that such
inquiries, on your part, are to terminate. Amid the varied occupations
and varied pleasures of your future years,--in the privacy of domestic
enjoyment, as much as in the busier scenes of active exertion,--the
studies on which you are about to enter must often rise to you again
with something more than mere remembrance; because there is nothing
that can give you interest, in any period or situation of your life,
to which they are not related. The science of mind, is the science of
yourselves; of all who surround you; of every thing which you enjoy or
suffer, or hope or fear: so truly the science of your very being, that
it will be impossible for you to look back on the feelings of a single
hour, without constantly retracing phenomena that have been here, to
a certain extent, the subjects of your analysis and arrangement. The
thoughts and faculties of your own intellectual frame, and all which
you admire as wonderful in the genius of others,--the moral obligation,
which, as obeyed or violated, is ever felt by you with delight or with
remorse,--the virtues, of which you think as often as you think of
those whom you love; and the vices, which you view with abhorrence, or
with pity,--the traces of divine goodness, which never can be absent
from your view, because there is no object in nature which does not
exhibit them,--the feeling of your dependence on the gracious Power
that formed you,--and the anticipation of a state of existence more
lasting than that which is measured by the few beatings of a feeble
pulse,--these in their perpetual recurrence, must often recal to you
the inquiries that, in this place, engaged your early attention. It
will be almost as little possible for you to abandon wholly such
speculations, as to look on the familiar faces of your home with a
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