Thomas Brown.

A writer, as he advances in life, ought to speak with diffidence of systems which he has only begun to consider with care after the age in which it becomes hard for his thoughts to flow into new channels. A reader cannot be said practically to understand a theory, till he has acquired the power of thinking, at least for a short time, with the theorist. Even a hearer, with all the helps of voice in the instructor, and of countenance from him and from fellow-hearers, finds it difficult to perform this necessary process, without either being betrayed into hasty and undistinguishing assent, or falling while he is in pursuit of an impartial estimate of opinions, into an indifference about their truth. I have felt this difficulty in reconsidering old opinions: but it is perhaps more needful to own its power, and to warn the reader against its effects, in the case of a philosopher well known to me, and with whom common friendships stood in the stead of much personal intercourse, as a cement of kindness. I very early read Brown’s Observations on the Zoonomia of Dr. Darwin,—the perhaps unmatched work of a boy in the eighteenth year of his age. His first tract on Causation appeared to me to be the finest model of discussion in mental philosophy since Berkeley and Hume,—with this superiority over the latter, that its aim is that of a philosopher who seeks to enlarge knowledge,—not that of sceptic, who—even the most illustrious—has no better end than that of displaying his powers in confounding and darkening truth,—and the happiest efforts of whose scepticism cannot be more leniently described than as brilliant fits of mental debauchery. From a diligent perusal of his succeeding works at the time of their publication, I was prevented by pursuits and duties of a very different nature. These causes, together with ill health and growing occupation, hindered me from reading his Lectures with due attention, till it has now become a duty to consider with care that part of them which relates to Ethics.

Dr. Brown was born of one of those families of ministers in the Scottish Church, who, after a generation or two of a humble life spent in piety and usefulness, with no more than needful knowledge, have more than once sent forth a man of genius from their cool and quiet shade, to make his fellows wiser or better by tongue or pen, by head or hand. Even the scanty endowments and constant residence of that Church, by keeping her ministers far from the objects which awaken turbulent passions and disperse the understanding on many pursuits, affords some of the leisure and calm of monastic life, without the exclusion of the charities of family and kindred. It may be well doubted whether this undissipated retirement, which during the eighteenth century was very general in Scotland, did not make full amends for the loss of curious and ornamental knowledge, by its tendency to qualify men for professional duty; with its opportunities for the cultivation of the reason for the many, and for high meditation, and concentration of thought on worthy objects for the few who have capacity for such exertions. An authentic account of the early exercises of Brown’s mind is preserved by his biographer, from which it appears that at the age of nineteen he took a part with others (some of whom became the most memorable men of their time), in the foundation of a private society in Edinburgh, under the name of “the Academy of Physics.”

The character of Dr. Brown is very attractive, as an example of one in whom the utmost tenderness of affection, and the indulgence of a flowery fancy, were not repressed by the highest cultivation, and by a perhaps excessive refinement of intellect. His mind soared and roamed through every region of philosophy and poetry; but his untravelled heart clung to the hearth of his father, to the children who shared it with him, and after them, first to the other partners of his childish sports, and then almost solely to those companions of his youthful studies who continued to be the friends of his life. Speculation seemed to keep his kindness at home. It is observable, that though sparkling with fancy, he does not seem to have been deeply or durably touched by those affections which are lighted at its torch, or at least tinged with its colours. His heart sought little abroad, but contentedly dwelt in his family and in his study. He was one of those men of genius who repaid the tender care of a mother by rocking the cradle of her reposing age. He ended a life spent in searching for truth, and exercising love, by desiring that he should be buried in his native parish, with his “dear father and mother.” Some of his delightful qualities were perhaps hidden from the casual observer in general society, by the want of that perfect simplicity of manner which is doubtless their natural representative. Manner is a better mark of the state of a mind, than those large and deliberate actions which form what is called conduct; it is the constant and insensible transpiration of character. In serious acts a man may display himself; in the thousand nameless acts which compose manner, the mind betrays its habitual bent. But manner is then only an index of disposition, when it is that of men who live at ease in the intimate familiarity of friends and equals. It may be diverted from simplicity by causes which do not reach so deep as the character;—by bad models, or by a restless and wearisome anxiety to shine, arising from many circumstances,—none of which are probably more common than the unseasonable exertions of a recluse student in society, and the unfortunate attempts of some others, to take by violence the admiration of those with whom they do not associate with ease. The association with unlike or superior companions which least distorts manners, is that which takes place with those classes whose secure dignity generally renders their own manners easy,—with whom the art of pleasing or of not displeasing each other in society is a serious concern,—who have leisure enough to discover the positive and negative parts of the smaller moralities, and who, being trained to a watchful eye on what is ludicrous, apply the lash of ridicule to affectation, the most ridiculous of faults. The busy in every department of life are too respectably occupied to form these manners: they are the frivolous work of polished idleness; and perhaps their most serious value consists in the war which they wage against affectation,—though even there they betray their origin in punishing it, not as a deviation from nature, but as a badge of vulgarity.

The prose of Dr. Brown is brilliant to excess: it must not be denied that its beauty is sometimes womanly,—that it too often melts down precision into elegance,—that it buries the main idea under a load of illustration, of which every part is expanded and adorned with such visible labour, as to withdraw the mind from attention to the thoughts which it professes to introduce more easily into the understanding. It is darkened by excessive brightness; it loses ease and liveliness by over-dress; and, in the midst of its luscious sweetness, we wish for the striking and homely illustrations of Tucker, and for the pithy and sinewy sense of Paley;—either of whom, by a single short metaphor from a familiar, perhaps a low object, could at one blow set the two worlds of Reason and Fancy in movement.

It would be unjust to censure severely the declamatory parts of his Lectures: they are excusable in the first warmth of composition; they might even be justifiable allurements in attracting young hearers to abstruse speculations. Had he lived, he would probably have taken his thoughts out of the declamatory forms of spoken address, and given to them the appearance, as well as the reality, of deep and subtile discussion. The habits, indeed, of so successful a lecturer, and the natural luxuriance of his mind, could not fail to have somewhat affected all his compositions; but though he might still have fallen short of simplicity, he certainly would have avoided much of the diffusion, and even common-place, which hang heavily on original and brilliant thoughts: for it must be owned, that though, as a thinker, he is unusually original, yet when he falls among the declaimers, he is infected by their common-places. In like manner, he would assuredly have shortened, or left out, many of the poetical quotations which he loved to recite, and which hearers even beyond youth hear with delight. There are two very different sorts of passages of poetry to be found in works on philosophy, which are as far asunder from each other in value as in matter. A philosopher will admit some of those wonderful lines or words which bring to light the infinite varieties of character, the furious bursts or wily workings of passion, the winding approaches of temptation, the slippery path to depravity, the beauty of tenderness, and the grandeur of what is awful and holy in Man. In every such quotation, the moral philosopher, if he be successful, uses the best materials of his science; for what are they but the results of experiment and observation on the human heart, performed by artists of far other skill and power than his? They are facts which could have only been ascertained by Homer, by Dante, by Shakspeare, by Cervantes, by Milton. Every year of admiration since the unknown period when the Iliad first gave delight, has extorted new proofs of the justness of the picture of human nature, from the responding hearts of the admirers. Every strong feeling which these masters have excited, is a successful repetition of their original experiment, and a continually growing evidence of the greatness of their discoveries. Quotations of this nature may be the most satisfactory, as well as the most delightful, proofs of philosophical positions. Others of inferior merit are not to be interdicted: a pointed maxim, especially when familiar, pleases, and is recollected. I cannot entirely conquer my passion for the Roman and Stoical declamation of some passages in Lucan and Akenside: but quotations from those who have written on philosophy in verse, or, in other words, from those who generally are inferior philosophers, and voluntarily deliver their doctrines in the most disadvantageous form, seem to be unreasonable. It is agreeable, no doubt, to the philosopher, and still more to the youthful student, to meet his abstruse ideas clothed in the sonorous verse of Akenside; the surprise of the unexpected union of verse with science is a very lawful enjoyment: but such slight and momentary pleasures, though they may tempt the writer to display them, do not excuse a vain effort to obtrude them on the sympathy of the searcher after truth in after-times. It is peculiarly unlucky that Dr. Brown should have sought supposed ornament from the moral common-places of Thomson, rather than from that illustration of philosophy which is really to be found in his picturesque strokes.

Much more need not be said of Dr. Brown’s own poetry,—somewhat voluminous as it is,—than that it indicates fancy and feeling, and rises at least to the rank of an elegant accomplishment. It may seem a paradox, but it appears to me that he is really most poetical in those poems and passages which have the most properly metaphysical character. For every varied form of life and nature, when it is habitually contemplated, may inspire feeling; and the just representation of these feelings may be poetical. Dr. Brown observed Man, and his wider world, with the eye of a metaphysician; and the dark results of such contemplations, when he reviewed them, often filled his soul with feelings which, being both grand and melancholy, were truly poetical. Unfortunately, however, few readers can be touched with fellow-feelings. He sings to few, and must be content with sometimes moving a string in the soul of the lonely visionary, who, in the day-dreams of youth, has felt as well as meditated on the mysteries of nature. His heart has produced charming passages in all his poems; but, generally speaking, they are only beautiful works of art and imitation. The choice of Akenside as a favourite and a model may, without derogation from that writer, be considered as no proof of a poetically formed mind. There is more poetry in many single lines of Cowper than in volumes of sonorous verses such as Akenside’s. Philosophical poetry is very different from versified philosophy: the former is the highest exertion of genius; the latter cannot be be ranked above the slighter amusements of ingenuity. Dr. Brown’s poetry was, it must be owned, composed either of imitations, which, with some exceptions, may be produced and read without feeling, or of effusions of such feelings only as meet a rare and faint echo in the human breast.

A few words only can here be bestowed on the intellectual part of his philosophy. It is an open revolt against the authority of Reid; and, by a curious concurrence, he began to lecture nearly at the moment when the doctrines of that philosopher came to be taught with applause in France. Mr. Stewart had dissented from the language of Reid, and had widely departed from his opinions on several secondary theories: Dr. Brown rejected them entirely. He very justly considered the claim of Reid to the merit of detecting the universal delusion which had betrayed philosophers into the belief that ideas which were the sole objects of knowledge had a separate existence, as a proof of his having mistaken their illustrative language for a metaphysical opinion; but he does not do justice to the service which Reid really rendered to mental science, by keeping the attention of all future speculators in a state of more constant watchfulness against the transient influence of such an illusion. His choice of the term “feeling” to denote the operations which we usually refer to the Understanding, is evidently too wide a departure from its ordinary use, to have any probability of general adoption. No definition can strip so familiar a word of the thoughts and emotions which have so long accompanied it, so as to fit it for a technical term of the highest abstraction. If we can be said to have a feeling “of the equality of the angle of forty-five to half the angle of ninety degrees,” we may call Geometry and Arithmetic sciences of “feeling.” He has very forcibly stated the necessity of assuming “the primary universal intuitions of direct belief,” which, in their nature, are incapable of all proof. They seem to be accurately described as notions which cannot be conceived separately, but without which nothing can be conceived. They are not only necessary to reasoning and to belief, but to thought itself. It is equally impossible to prove or to disprove them. He has very justly blamed the school of Reid for “an extravagant and ridiculous” multiplication of those principles which he truly represents as inconsistent with sound philosophy. To philosophize is in deed nothing more than to simplify securely.

The substitution of “suggestion” for the former phrase of “association of ideas,” would hardly deserve notice in so cursory a view, if it had not led him to a serious misconception of the doctrines and deserts of other philosophers. The fault of the latter phrase is rather in the narrowness of the last than in the inadequacy of the first word. ‘Association’ presents the fact in the light of a relation between two mental acts: ‘suggestion’ denotes rather the power of the one to call up the other. But whether we say that the sight of ashes ‘suggests’ fire, or that the ideas of fire and ashes are ‘associated,’ we mean to convey the same fact, and, in both cases, an exact thinker means to accompany the fact with no hypothesis. Dr. Brown has supposed the word “association” as intended to affirm that there is some “intermediate process” between the original succession of the mental acts and the power which they acquired therefrom of calling up each other. This is quite as much to raise up imaginary antagonists for the honour of conquering them, as he justly reprehends Dr. Reid for doing in the treatment of preceding philosophers. He falls into another more important and unaccountable error, in representing his own reduction of Mr. Hume’s principles of association (—resemblance, contrariety, causation, contiguity in time or place) to the one principle of contiguity, as a discovery of his own, by which his theory is distinguished from “the universal opinion of philosophers.” Nothing but too exclusive a consideration of the doctrines of the Scottish school could have led him to speak thus of what was hinted by Aristotle, distinctly laid down by Hobbes, and fully unfolded both by Hartley and Condillac. He has, however, extremely enlarged the proof and the illustration of this law of mind, by the exercise of “a more subtile analysis” and the disclosure of “a finer species of proximity.” As he has thus aided and confirmed, though he did not discover, the general law, so he has rendered a new and very important service to mental science, by drawing attention to what he properly calls “secondary laws of Suggestion” or Association, which modify the action of the general law, and must be distinctly considered, in order to explain its connection with the phenomena. The enumeration and exposition are instructive, and the example is worthy of commendation. For it is in this lower region of the science that most remains to be discovered; it is that which rests most on observation, and least tempts to controversy: it is by improvements in this part of our knowledge that the foundations are secured, and the whole building so repaired as to rest steadily on them. The distinction of common language between the head and the heart, which, as we have seen, is so often overlooked or misapplied by metaphysicians, is, in the system of Brown, signified by the terms “mental states” and “emotions.” It is unlucky that no single word could be found for the former, and that the addition of the generic term “feeling” should disturb its easy comprehension, when it is applied more naturally.

In our more proper province Brown followed Butler (who appears to have been chiefly known to him through the writings of Mr. Stewart), in his theory of the social affections. Their disinterestedness is enforced by the arguments of both these philosophers, as well as by those of Hutcheson. It is observable, however, that Brown applies the principle of Suggestion, or Association, boldly to this part of human nature, and seems inclined to refer to it even Sympathy itself. It is hard to understand how, with such a disposition on the subject of a principle so generally thought ultimate as Sympathy, he should, inconsistently with himself, follow Mr. Stewart in representing the theory which derives the affections from Association as “a modification of the Selfish system.” He mistakes that theory when he states, that it derives the affections from our experience that our own interest is connected with that of others; since, in truth, it considers our regard to our own interest as formed from the same original pleasures by association, which, by the like process, may and do directly generate affections towards others, without passing through the channel of regard to our general happiness. But, says he, this is only an hypothesis, since the formation of these affections is acknowledged to belong to a time of which there is no remembrance;—an objection fatal to every theory of any mental functions,—subversive, for example, of Berkeley’s discovery of acquired visual perception, and most strangely inconsistent in the mouth of a philosopher whose numerous simplifications of mental theory are and must be founded on occurrences which precede experience. It is in all other cases, and it must be in this, sufficient that the principle of the theory is really existing,—that it explains the appearances,—that its supposed action resembles what we know to be its action in those similar cases of which we have direct experience. Lastly, he in express words admits that, according to the theory to which he objects, we have affections which are at present disinterested. Is it not a direct contradiction in terms to call such a theory “a modification of the Selfish system?” His language in the sequel clearly indicates a distrust of his own statement, and a suspicion that he is not only inconsistent with himself, but altogether mistaken.

As we enter farther into the territory of Ethics, we at length discover a distinction, originating with Brown, the neglect of which by preceding speculators we have more than once lamented as productive of obscurity and confusion. “The moral affections,” says he, “which I consider at present, I consider rather physiologically” (or, as he elsewhere better expresses it, “psychologically”) “than ethically, as parts of our mental constitution, not as involving the fulfilment or violation of duties.” He immediately, however, loses sight of this distinction, and reasons inconsistently with it, instead of following its proper consequences in his analysis of Conscience. Perhaps, indeed, (for the words are capable of more than one sense) he meant to distinguish the virtuous affections from those sentiments which have Morality exclusively in view, rather than to distinguish the theory of Moral Sentiment from the attempt to ascertain the characteristic quality of right action. Friendship is conformable in its dictates to Morality; but it may, and does exist, without any view to it: he who feels the affections, and performs the duties of friendship, is the object of that distinct emotion which is called “moral approbation.”

It is on the subject of Conscience that, in imitation of Mr. Stewart, and with the arguments of that philosopher, he makes his chief stand against the theory which considers the formation of that master faculty itself as probably referable to the necessary and universal operation of those laws of human nature to which he himself ascribes almost every other state of mind. On both sides of this question the supremacy of Conscience is alike held to be venerable and absolute. Once more, be it remembered, that the question is purely philosophical, and is only whether, from the impossibility of explaining its formation by more general laws, we are reduced to the necessity of considering it as an original fact in human nature, of which no further account can be given. Let it, however, be also remembered, that we are not driven to this supposition by the mere circumstance, that no satisfactory explanation has yet appeared; for there are many analogies in an unexplained state of mind to states already explained, which may justify us in believing that the explanation requires only more accurate observation, and more patient meditation, to be brought to that completeness which it probably will attain.