HKB
which signifies the “right law of heaven”; if her right-hand holds the “book of the justice of the King omnipotent,” the sceptre in her left is “corporal judgment against sin(20).”
There is indeed no sufficient reason for contemning the term Mind. If Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind has—perhaps to a dainty taste—made the word unsavoury, that is no reason for refusing to give it all the wealth of soul and heart, of intellect and will. The mens aeterna which, if we hear Tacitus, expressed the Hebrew conception of the spirituality of God, and the Νοῦς which Aristotelianism set supreme in the Soul, are not the mere or abstract intelligence, which late-acquired habits of abstraction have made out of them. If the reader will adopt the term (in want of a better) in its widest scope, we may shelter ourselves under the example of Wordsworth. His theme is—as he describes it in the Recluse—“the Mind and Man”: his
“voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted;—and how exquisitely too The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish.”
The verse which expounds that “high argument” speaks
“Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith.”
And the poet adds:
“As we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man— My haunt, and the main region of my song; Beauty—a living Presence of the earth Surpassing the most fair ideal forms ... waits upon my steps.”
The reality duly seen in the spiritual vision
“That inspires The human Soul of universal earth Dreaming of things to come”
will be a greater glory than the ideals of imaginative fiction ever fancied:
“For the discerning intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day.”
If Wordsworth, thus, as it were, echoing the great conception of Francis Bacon,
“Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation,”
perhaps the poet and the essayist may help us with Hegel to rate the Mind—the Mind of Man—at its highest value.
Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.
It is not going too far to say that in common estimation psychology has as yet hardly reached what Kant has called the steady walk of science—der sichere Gang der Wissenschaft. To assert this is not, of course, to throw any doubts on the importance of the problems, or on the intrinsic value of the results, in the studies which have been prosecuted under that name. It is only to note the obvious fact that a number of inquiries of somewhat discrepant tone, method, and tendency have all at different times covered themselves under the common title of psychological, and that the work of orientation is as yet incomplete. Such a destiny seems inevitable, when a name is coined rather as the title of an unexplored territory, than fixed on to describe an accomplished fact.
(i.) Psychology as a Science and as a Part of Philosophy.