these will never teach us the reason why we think and
feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to
us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which
we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how
worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for
him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even
know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause
why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his
essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great
genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George
Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of
expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of
conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces
scientifically, but not a living soul. I am helpless before Mr.
Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my ease before Macaulay
or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could presumably take the last two
to pieces and analyse them as if they were skeletons; but before
Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now we want a scientific
reason for all this; we want to analyse, not the skeleton, that has
been done often enough, but "the living soul." We want to know the
ingredients of character that constituted Mr. Buchanan's preferences.
What composition gave him his special temper and character? Why did
his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and away from George Eliot? Why
in short did his mind work in the way it did? The more original the
mind, the more its investigation would repay us. But it must be
self-investigation; what we want are facts of mind, mental data and in
order to get them, we must investigate the living mind All the usual
explanations of Temperament, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same
difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a
circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to
investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex
mind, no matter how I inherit it, here it is; now then, how does it
work, what can I do with it? And then comes the further inevitable
question--What is it? What is this thing, this me, which tends to feel
and act in a certain direction--to admire spontaneously, this, and to
despise with as perfect ease, that. What we need for scientific
investigation into the ME is "to utilise