Some Recent Views Upon Mind [pp. 747-756]

x88i.J SOME REc~KT VIEWS UFOK MI~D. 749
of th~ latter, to prove that what Aristotle wrote concerning the
faculties of the soul, what Plato wrote, and all that brilliant line
of thinkers running through medi~val times down to the seventeenth century, either was erroneous or is insufficient to meet the
demands which newly-discovered facts are making. Not so,
however; they brush the past aside with a contemptuous wave,
and give forth speculations which, as we hope to prove, cannot
stand the test of a logical scrutiny. The old-fashioned psychologist, for instance, desirous of knowing how modern matenalism is
disposed to treat the arguments by which he was accustomed to
establish the incorporeal character of the mind, will look in vain
for an attempted refutation. He might say: "After all it is true
that, if consciousness is in the least trustworthy, it teaches us that
an idea is simple and indivisible, and can never, consequently,
be made commensurate with a millionth part of a nerve-cell. I
wonder what Dr. Bastian and Dr. Maudsley will say to this."
But his inquiry is bootless, for those free lances in mental science
deliver their blows only where they list, and not where their
force might be most keenly felt.
Dr. Bastian wishes to enlarge the meaning of the term mind
by including among mental phenomena those nerve-changes
which we know to accompany them, and`he thus adroitly makes
mind a mere function of nerve-action. For if we must include
nerve-change among the phenomena of mind, we must make it
also cause thereof, since in that case it becomes the mental precursor of mental action. He is, therefore, a materialist of th~
most pronounced sort, but he is loyally such and does not hesitate to eliminate spirit as an impossible factor in his theory of
mind He divides our sources of mental knowledge into subjective psychology, or consciousness supplemented by what we are
able to infer from the words or actions of our fellow-men and
lower animals (objective psychology), and what we are able to
learn as to the dependence of these subjective states on certain
bodily conditions of man and other animals. These being our
sources of psychical knowledge, according to Dr. Bastian, we
must, in estimating the data of consciousness, not view them
only in the light in which consciousness exhibits them, but also as
modified in their origin and character by previous nervous conditions. If we were to lean implicitly and exclusively, he says,
upon the direct revelations of consciousness, we would inevitably
commit ourselves to a system of universal scepticism, needing, as
Hume proclaimed, a rejection of all grounds of certainty for our
belief in an external world, in body, and indeed in mind as