he proceeds to justify his own
mode of looking at the moral sentiments from the anatomist's point of
view.

[15] The manner in which Hume constantly refers to the results of the
observation of the contents and the processes of his own mind clearly
shows that he has here inadvertently overstated the case.

[16] Locke, _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, Book I, chap. i,
Sec.Sec. 4, 5, 6.

[17] _Kritik der reinen Vernunft._ Ed. Hartenstein, p. 256.

CHAPTER II.

THE CONTENTS OF THE MIND.

In the language of common life, the "mind" is spoken of as an entity,
independent of the body, though resident in and closely connected with
it, and endowed with numerous "faculties," such as sensibility,
understanding, memory, volition, which stand in the same relation to the
mind as the organs do to the body, and perform the functions of feeling,
reasoning, remembering, and willing. Of these functions, some, such as
sensation, are supposed to be merely passive--that is, they are called
into existence by impressions, made upon the sensitive faculty by a
material world of real objects, of which our sensations are supposed to
give us pictures; others, such as the memory and the reasoning faculty,
are considered to be partly passive and partly active; while volition is
held to be potentially, if not always actually, a spontaneous activity.

The popular classification and terminology of the phenomena of
consciousness, however, are by no means the first crude conceptions
suggested by common sense, but rather a legacy, and, in many respects, a
sufficiently _damnosa haereditas_, of ancient philosophy, more or less
leavened by theology; which has incorporated itself with the common
thought of later times, as the vices of the aristocracy of one age
become those of the mob in the next. Very little attention to what
passes in the mind is sufficient to show, that these conceptions involve
assumptions of an extremely hypothetical character. And the first
business of the student of psychology is to get rid of such
prepossessions; to form conceptions of mental phenomena as they are
given us by observation, without any hypothetical admixture, or with
only so much as is definitely recognised and held subject to
confirmation or otherwise; to classify these phenomena according to
their clearly recognisable characters; and to adopt a nomenclature which
suggests nothing beyond the results of observation. Thus chastened,
observation o