sepulture on land is not recorded on any evidence it is almost certain that at Pamplemousses no one is buried from the St. Géran. One account of the island says: "Modern speculation has profited by the interest excited by their story, in the erection of two little monuments, entitled the tombs of Paul and Virginia." And another writer says that the tomb of Virginia was first erected, but the numerous pilgrims and visitors asking constantly for the other, not to disappoint them, the proprietor added that of Paul.

ART. II.-MR. HERBERT SPENCER'S "SYSTEM OF

PHILOSOPHY."

(Being PART IX. of an Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's
"Psychology.")

THE

HE somewhat laborious task of minutely examining each section of every chapter* of Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Psychology" is now happily at an end. What remains to be considered may be handled differently.

*For the convenience of readers who may not have read the antecedent papers, I append the following references to them and to the work examined by them. Mr. Spencer's "Psychology" is a work in two volumes and eight parts, four parts being contained in his first volume. His Second Edition (the one examined) was published in 1872. The first six of these eight parts have now been examined in eight Essays, which have from time to time appeared in this REVIEW. The first Essay appeared in the DUBLIN REVIEW for Oct. 1874, pp. 476-508, and was devoted to an examination of the first part and the first chapter of the second part of Mr. Spencer's "Psychology." The second Essay appeared in the number for July, 1875, pp. 143-172, and concluded the examination of Mr. Spencer's second part. The third Essay was published in the DUBLIN REVIEW for Jan. 1877, pp. 192-219. It treated of the third part and the first six chapters of the fourth part of the "Psychology." The fourth Essay came out in April, 1877, p. 479, and reviewed the rest of Mr. Spencer's fourth part and the whole of his fifth part. The fifth and sixth Essays appeared respectively in Jan. 1878, pp. 157-194, and in Oct. 1878, p. 412. They treated of the first thirteen chapters of Mr. Spencer's sixth part, the examination of the rest of his sixth part being continued and concluded in the seventh and eighth Essays which were published, respectively in Jan. 1879, pp. 141-163, and in April, 1879, pp. 368-396. Thus, four Essays and 132 pages have been devoted to the examination of Mr. Spencer's first volume, and four Essays and 118 pages to that of the first part of his second volume, i.e., to the sixth, and in many respects. most important, part.

It has been deemed necessary so far to pursue the mode hitherto adopted, for two reasons: first, in order to guard as fully as possible against doing an injustice to the author criticized; secondly, because Mr. Spencer's whole metaphysical sytem avowedly reposes upon the special psychology he has developed, and no refutation of his philosophy could be satisfactory unless good evidence was given that his psychological views had been carefully considered and duly appreciated.

In the first six parts of his work all his fundamental principles are laid down, and all those facts and instances are given on which he relies for the support of his system. The various physiological and mental phenomena therein brought forward and his inferences from them have, therefore, seemed to require the most thorough and careful consideration possible.

In his seventh part, however, Mr. Spencer turns from considering the phenomena of animal life and of the human mind*

As a new subject is thus entered upon it may be well to supply the reader with a brief enumeration of the contents of the earlier portions of Mr. Spencer's work.

The first part (the Data of Psychology) is an account of the essential and fundamental structure of the nervous system, with its supposed mode of action, together with the material conditions which influence such action, and contains statements as to the correlation of feeling and nervous conditions. Its contents may be thus summarized: Quantity and complexity of self-motion in animals vary with the mass and complexity of their nervous system (consisting of white conducting and grey quasi-explosive parts), which requires integrity, nutrition and warmth for its due action in pulsating intermittent nerve-reverberations-feelings running parallel to and follow the laws of nervous action.

His second part (the Inductions of Psychology) is an account of feelings from a subjective stand-point. The mind is therein represented as known only in states (each ultimately compound though seemingly simple), formed of feelings and relations (themselves feelings) between feelings segregated to their like in classes and sub-classes, according as they are simultaneous or successive, like or unlike-nothing being knowable except complexly segregated feelings transformed by repetition. A real objective cause, it is affirmed, is implied and must be assumed, but neither feelings nor relations are really equivalent to such objective nexus which is unknowable. Feelings and relations are said to be revivable and associable in the degree in which they are relational, and according to the conditions under which they are experienced. Pleasures and pains are represented as due to natural selection, which has evolved them in races which it has thus preserved.

His third part (General Synthesis) is an attempt, by a comparison of the phenomena of mind with those of organic life, to reinforce the argument of the two preceding parts. He attempts to show that all sense springs from primitive organic sensibility; that all the several senses spring similarly from primitive feeling; that similarly each special sense becomes more and more differentiated; that as sense-response is a correspondence of inner with outer relations, so intellectual response is but a further carrying out of the same process, and is separated from the

to the "consideration of the nature of human knowledge," and to criticisms of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, to questions which admit of a more free mode of treatment, while, at the same time, they may not be without interest for the general reader.

former by no hiatus. Thus, he herein endeavours to show, by an elaborate comparison of Mind with Life, that the former, like the latter, is a correspondence between inner and outer relations, this correspondence increasing in speciality, generality, complexity, co-ordination and integration, as we advance from the lowest organisms up to civilized man-the highest mental acts arising by imperceptible gradations from primitive vital irritability. In his fourth part (Special Synthesis) Mr.Spencer continues to apply his interpretation of mental states as phases and factors in the correspondence of inner to outer relations, to the various mental powers from reflex actions, through instinct and memory to reason, emotion and will. He tries to explain them as different degrees of such correspondence and different degrees and kinds of failure in adjustment, and so, from another point of view, to show that no hiatus exists between the lowest and the highest psychical states.

In his fifth part (Physical Synthesis) he tries to show that mental acts are interpretable in terms of matter and motion. He does so first by a sketch of a supposed mode of genesis of nervous systems, and then by showing how the various functions, translated into mental states, harmonize with the physical conception. The ultimate outcome of the teaching is that mental acts may be interpreted in terms of matter and motion, but that both these are alike unanalyzable, and are both caused by one inscrutable entity which is neither.

The gist of the five parts, which together form Mr. Spencer's first volume, may be shortly expressed thus :

I. Motion and feelings are parallelly correlated with nervous structure. II. Nothing is knowable but feelings which we must take as symbols of the unknowable, in the unanalyzable forms-mind, matter, motion.

III. Mind is essentially the same as physiological activity.

IV. There is no hiatus between the lowest and the highest psychical activities the latter being the former; reiterated, accumulated, organized and inherited.

V. Mental phenomena may be interpreted in terms of matter and motion-the latter being but symbols of the one unknowable cause of both mind and matter.

In the first volume, then, objective science is employed in attempting to explain the genesis and nature of the process of knowing.

In his sixth part (Special Analysis) Mr. Spencer proceeds to examine analytically the knowing process under all its forms, recognized by him, from the most complex to the most simple.

Thus, he therein treats of quantitative and qualitative reasoning and reasoning in general. Also classification, naming and recognition, the perception of objects, of space, of time, of motion, of resistance, and perception in general. This is followed by chapters on relations of similarity, co-intention, co-extension, connature and likeness, together with their opposites. Then follows a consideration of sequence and of consciousness in general, and the whole part concludes with a statement of what Mr. Spencer considers to be the legitimate results of what has preceded. The essence of this sixth part, then, is the contention that subjective psychology shows every thought or perception whatever to be a feeling of relations between relations, and all thoughts to be ultimately reducible to aggre

But Mr. Spencer's philosophy has quite special claims on the interest and attention of Catholics, for there are many indications that it may be nothing less than the morning star heralding the dawn of a day of philosophical revival in England. Spencerism, like Lockism, may form a landmark in the history of Philosophy. Like Locke, Mr. Spencer has enunciated an ambiguous system -one capable of two distinct interpretations. It has been the fate of Locke to have been accepted and developed mainly in accordance with his negative and irrational side. It may be, and we trust it will be, Mr. Spencer's happier lot to be accepted and developed in harmony with those elements of truth which his system contains. Fatal and deplorable as are the errors he maintains, yet his inconsistencies may be so used as to neutralize each other, and the judicious application of a little "transverse vibration" to his system might rapidly and without violence convert it into an "allotropic state," in which its conspicuous characters would be startlingly diverse from those that it exhibits at present.

In fact, Mr. Spencer's system, by its inconsistencies and lacunæ, cries aloud for the scholastic philosophy to sustain and complete it, while it brings to the support of that philosophy a great variety of considerations, and helps to show how thoroughly it harmonizes with the most advanced science of the day-as fully with the science of the nineteenth century as with that of the thirteenth; indeed, in some respects, much more completely!

Spencerism also helps to refute and expose the shallowness of the philosophy of Descartes, and of all those who have followed in his footsteps (or in those of Locke) down to the present day; and so aids religion in another mode. For nothing is more common than to find religion assailed by means of attacks directed against views which the assailants believe to be essential to it; whereas, in truth, the views attacked are but philosophical errors which have descended from Descartes, but which may have been made use of, with more zeal than discretion, by some of the many

gated and segregated feelings of shock (supposed to be the psychical side of physiological nervous shocks), the ultimate psychical shock being either a feeling of unlikeness or of sequence, according to the direction taken by thought.

His seventh part (General Analysis), to the examination of which the present Essay is devoted, is occupied with an examination of different metaphysical systems and with the exposition of Mr. Spencer's own system.

In his eighth and last part (Corollaries) Mr. Spencer considers the classification of psychical powers and the development of conceptions, and treats of emotions and sentiments considered as preliminaries of the science of sociology.

good Christians who have adopted some or other form of Cartesianism instead of the older and emphatically Catholic philosophy.

Mr. Spencer, however, is evidently far from suspecting his own proximity to truth; and in the part of his psychology we are about to review, ignores in the most innocent way all philosophy save his own, and the various modified Cartesian philosophic heresies he attacks.

This mode of ignoring what it most behoves him to note, runs on all fours with the treatment he has again and again bestowed on psychological matters, as we have pointed out in the various preceding parts of this examination. Throughout, his fallacy has been that of presenting a part for the whole, and the part he has presented has ever been the part least important and significant. He is ever and again committing an error similar to that of describing "sculpture" as "stone breaking;" an ascent of Mont Blanc as composed of "a set of foot movements;" or "eating" as "muscular contractions."* His whole psychology is directed against the recognition of intellect and knowledge because he does not know how intellect and knowledge are possible, and because their unequivocal recognition would be fatal to his system. He therefore employs an exceptionally acute and powerful intellect, exceptionally stored with knowledge, in the task of proving we can neither acquire the latter nor employ the former since he thinks he has shown by the employment of both that neither have any existence. Thus, as has been again and again pointed out, he ignores our highest faculties altogether, and we have not yet met in his psychology with one explicit recognition of our power of apprehending truth, goodness, or beauty, or even with an apprehension of identity.

The recognition of such grave defects may seem inconsistent with what has been just said about the value of Mr. Spencer's system for Catholics,t and may support the question whether too much time and trouble is not being taken with the examination of his psychology. But in these defects our author does not stand alone; he inherits them from, and shares them with, the whole sensist school. Mr. Herbert Spencer is the best representative man of a phase of modern philosophy, and his influence is extending not only throughout Englishspeaking countries-notably in the United States-but also in France. Mr. Spencer has been termed by Mr. Darwin "our great philosopher," and there is no doubt that he is regarded by many Darwinians and followers of Haeckel as the *See DUBLIN REVIEW for Jan. 1879, p. 386.

The writings of the late George Henry Lewes have perhaps even more value still for us, as justifying the scholastic philosophy. DUBLIN REVIEW, October, 1874, p. 476.