T

HE studies of Metaphysics and Medicine
have more in common than may perhaps

at first sight appear. These two sciences, as learnt, taught, and practised by the two admirable men we are about to speak of, were in the main not ends in themselves, but means. The one, as Locke pursued it, is as truly a search after truth and matter of fact, as the other; and neither Metaphysics nor Medicine is worth a rational man's while, if they do not issue certainly and speedily in helping us to keep and to make our minds and our bodies whole, quick, and strong. Soundness of mind, the just use of reason-what Arnauld finely calls droiture de l'âme-and the cultivation for good of our entire thinking nature, our common human understanding, is as truly the one great end of the Philosophy of Mind, as the full exercise of our bodily functions, and their recovery and relief when

deranged or impaired, is of the Science of Medicine, -the Philosophy of Healing; and no man taught the world to better purpose than did John Locke, that mental science, like every other, is founded upon fact-upon objective realities, upon an induction of particulars, and is in this sense as much a matter of proof as is carpentry, or the doctrine of projectiles. The Essay on Human Understanding contains a larger quantity of facts about our minds, a greater amount of what everybody knows to be true, than any other book of the same nature. The reasonings may be now and then erroneous and imperfect, but the ascertained truths remain, and may be operated upon by all after-comers.

John Locke and Thomas Sydenham,-the one the founder of our analytical philosophy of mind, and the other of our practical medicine,-were not only great personal friends, but were of essential use to each other in their respective departments; and we may safely affirm, that for much in the Essay on Human Understanding we are indebted to its author's intimacy with Sydenham, "one of the master builders at this time in the commonwealth of learning," as Locke calls him, in company with

Boyle, Huygens, and the incomparable Mr. Newton" And Sydenham, it is well known, in his dedicatory letter to their common friend Dr.

Mapletoft, prefixed to the third edition of his Observationes Medica, expresses his obligation to Locke in these words :-" Nôsti præterea, quam huic meæ methodo suffragantem habeam, qui eam intimius per omnia perspexerat, utrique nostrum conjunctissimum Dominum Johannem Lock; quo quidem viro, sive ingenio judicioque acri et subacto, sive etiam antiquis (hoc est optimis) moribus, vix superiorem quenquam inter eos qui nunc sunt homines repertum iri confido, paucissimos certe pares." Referring to this passage, when noticing the early training of this ingenium judiciumque acre et subactum, Dugald Stewart says, with great truth, "No science could have been chosen, more happily calculated than Medicine, to prepare such a mind for the prosecution of those speculations which have immortalized his name; the complicated and fugitive, and often equivocal phenomena of disease, requiring in the observer a far greater proportion of discriminating sagacity than those of Physics, strictly so called; resembling, in this respect, much more nearly, the phenomena about which Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics are conversant." And he shrewdly adds, “I have said that the study of Medicine forms one of the best preparations for the study of Mind, to such an understanding as Locke's. To an understanding less comprehensive, and less

cultivated by a liberal education, the effect of this study is likely to be similar to what we may have in the works of Hartley, Darwin, and Cabanis; to all of whom we may more or less apply the sarcasm of Cicero on Aristoxenus the musician, who attempted to explain the nature of the soul by comparing it to a harmony; Hic ab artificio suo non recessit."

The observational and only genuine study of mind—not the mere reading of metaphysical books, and knowing the endless theories of mind, but the true study of its phenomena-has always seemed to us (speaking quâ medici) one of the most important, as it certainly is the most studiously neglected, of the accessary disciplines of the student of medi

cine.

Hartley, Mackintosh, and Brown, were physicians; and we know that medicine was a favourite subject with Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Berkeley, and Sir William Hamilton. We wish our young doctors kept more of the company of these and suchlike men, and knew a little more of the laws of thought, the nature and rules of evidence, the general procedure of their own minds in the search after, the proof and the application of what is true, than we fear they generally do.1

1 Pinel states, with much precision, the necessity there

They might do so without knowing less of their Auscultation, Histology, and other good things, and with knowing them to better 'purpose. We wonder, for instance, how many of the century of graduates sent forth from our famous University every year-armed with microscope, stethoscope, uroscope, pleximeter, etc., and omniscient of râles and rhonchi, sibilous and sonorous; crepitations moist and dry; bruits de râpe, de scie, et de soufflet; blood plasmata, cytoblasts and nucleated cells, and great in the infinitely little, we wonder how many of these eager and accomplished youths could "unsphere the spirit of Plato," or are able to read with moderate relish and understanding one of the Tusculan Disputations, or have so much as even heard of Butler's Three Sermons on Human Nature, Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, or of a posthumous

is for physicians to make the mind of man, as well as his body, their especial study. "L'histoire de l'entendement humain, pourroit-elle être ignorée par le médecin, qui a non-seulement à décrire les vésanies ou maladies morales, et à indiquer toutes leurs nuances, mais encore, qui a besoin de porter la logique la plus sévère pour éviter de donner de la réalité à de termes abstraits, pour procéder avec sagesse des idées simples à des idées complexes, et qui a sans cesse sous ses yeux des écrits, où le défaut de s'entendre, la séduction de l'esprit de système, et l'abus des expressions vagues et indéterminées ont amené de milliers des volumes et des disputes interminables ?"-Méthodes d'étudier en Médecine.