Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/97

NOTES ON ARISTOTLE'S PSYCHOLOGY IN RELATION TO MODERN THOUGHT. 1 By J. M. BlGG. THE common division of history into ancient and modern is for some purposes misleading. The Greeks in the fourth century B.C. were in many respects moderns. They had their mediaeval period, their era of faith and chivalry in the so-called heroic age, of which the memory is preserved in the Homeric poems but which had passed away when in the seventh century B.C. these poems were reduced to writing, and already in the fifth century B.C. their modes of thinking were nearer to that which we call the modern spirit than those of any modern nation before the fifteenth century of the present era. Since that epoch indeed the modern peoples, profiting by the heritage which the Greeks left them, have made rapid and unprecedented progress especially in physical science ; but even in physical science this progress would have been impossible but for the records of the specula- tions of the Greeks discovered during the Eenaissance, specula- tions by which they laid the basis of every science, except chemistry and its dependents, which now occupies the attention of mankind. I am not however one of those who wish to minimise the originality of the modern mind, and I fully admit that even in pure philosophy its originality has been conspicuously exhibited. Yet I cannot but consider that the systems most popular in this country at the present day would have been rightly regarded by Aristotle as anachronisms. The problem of pure psychology has indeed nothing in common with the problems of physical science, and the method which yields such magnificent results in the latter has no applicability to the former. The problem of inductive science is, in Baconian phrase, to de- termine not only the form of a phenomenon but the latent pro- cess which results in the form (laf*. 1 //* jurocf**//* ml /</////<///>), in other words, to determine the law of the genesis of phenomena ; and to that end it employs observation, experiment to guide and supplement observation, generalisation to universalise the results of observation, and experiment to test the validity of the con- clusions reached by generalisation. Now, in order that the applicability of this method to the philosophy of consciousness should be made out, one or other of two points must be esta- blished : either (1) that consciousness had a genesis, or (2) that the assumption that it had one is a reasonable assumption. In- asmuch, however, as the genesis of consciousness can neither be 1 The substance of this paper was iv;i<l before the Philosophical Society on 23rd April, 1885.