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
“Ask the swain,
Who journeys homeward, from a summer day's
Long labour, why, forgetful of his toils
And due repose, he loiters to behold
The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds,
O'er all the western sky? Full soon, I ween,
His rude expression, and untutor'd airs,
Beyond the power of language, will unfold
The form of Beauty smiling at his heart,
How lovely, how commanding!”[38]
But the mere emotion which beauty produces, is not the knowledge of
the simpler feelings that have composed or modified it; and though the
pleasure and admiration were to continue exactly the same, the peasant
would surely have learned something, if he could be made to understand,
that beauty was more than the form and colour which his eye perceived.
What is thus true of beauty as differently understood by the peasant
and the philosopher, is true, in like manner, of all the other complex
mental phenomena. It would, indeed, be as reasonable to affirm, that,
because we all move our limbs, we are all equally acquainted with the
physiology of muscular motion; or, to take a case still more exactly
appropriate, that we know all the sublimest truths of arithmetic
and geometry, because we know all the numbers and figures of the
mere relations of which these are the science,--as that we are all
acquainted with the physiology of the mind, and the number of elements
which enter into our various feelings, because we all perceive, and
remember, and love, and hate. It is, it will be allowed, chiefly, or
perhaps, wholly, as it is _analytical_, that the science of mind admits
of _discovery_; but, as a science of analysis, in which new relations
are continually felt on reflection, it presents us with a field of
discovery as rich, and, I may say, almost as inexhaustible in wonders,
as that of the universe without.
“It is thus,” I have elsewhere remarked, “even in phenomena, which
seem so simple as scarcely to have admitted combination, what wonders
have been developed by scientific inquiry! Perception itself, that
primary function of the mind, which was surely the same before Berkeley
examined the laws of vision as at present, is now regarded by us very
differently, in relation to the most important of its organs; and it
would not be easy to find, amid all the brilliant discoveries of modern
chemistry, and even in the whole range of the physics of matter, a
proposition more completely revolting to popular belief, than that,
which it is now the general faith of philosophers, that the sense of
sight, which seems to bring the farthest hills of the most extended
landscape, and the very boundlessness of space before our view, is,
of itself, incapable of shewing us a single line of longitudinal
distance.”[39]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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