Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy [pp. 261-279]

268 Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy.
sal consciousness, (communis sensus,) he and his followers
adopted the convenient titles, Philosophy of the Intellectual
Powers, of the Active and Moral Powers, of the Human Mind,
of Common Sense, to indicate their sphere of operations; in cluding not merely psychology proper, but as much metaphysics as they saw fit to deal with. Owing to the fortunate
ascendency of the Scotch school in Britain and America, these
terms have continued in use to denote indiscriminately metaphysics and psychology, so that many confound the two, not
knowing where one ends and the other begins.
Mental Philosophy strictly understood is indeed simply Psychology. And Psychology is simply the science which investigates and determines the operations, laws and faculties of the
mind, as these are given in, or inferrible from the phenomena
of consciousness. It is therefore a science of phenomena, of
facts, of contingent truths. It classes therefore with the inductive
sciences. In this respect it classes with the physical sciences,
and has even by some writers been styled physical. As such,
its province is, first, to ascertain the facts of consciousness,
and next, to propound that and that only concerning the mind,
which is fairly implied in these facts. Its simple function is to
find and teach what the mind does and suffers, and thence
what it is; not what by any a priori reasoning it may be
shown that it ought to be. This, it may be remarked in passing, rules out all claims of Phrenology to be in any sense a
philosophy of mind, since, whatever may be its uses, it never
can give us a single phenomenon of consciousness. It may
serve a great many good purposes, to map out the skull, and
take the mensuration of its parts, but this can never reveal a
single mental act. On the other hand, it rules out the pretensions of Rational Psychology, which some transcendentalists
elevate above that derived from consciousness, and insist upon
as a method of demonstrating a priori the possibility and
validity of the latter. This method culminates in cosmogonies
a priori, showing how potential, infinite, absolute being becomes actual, finite, and conditioned in the mere process of
existing, instead of finding what the creation really is, and
thence deducing those "invisible things" of its Creator, which
are clearly seen and known from the things that are made.
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