and Association, is not a mere matter
of abstract speculation; it is full of practical consequences, and lies
at the foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion
in an age of progress. The practical reformer has continually to demand
that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and
widely-spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and
indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable
part of his argument to show, how those powerful feelings had their
origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible.
There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy
which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by
circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate
elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up
favourite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the
voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that
of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing
tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as
innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs
that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between
individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally
would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief
hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one
of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. This tendency has
its source in the intuitional metaphysics which characterized the
reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, and it is a
tendency so agreeable to human indolence, as well as to conservative
interests generally, that unless attacked at the very root, it is sure
to be carried to even a greater length than is really justified by the
more moderate forms of the intuitional philosophy. That philosophy not
always in its moderate forms, had ruled the thought of Europe for the
greater part of a century. My father's _Analysis of the Mind_, my own
_Logic_, and Professor Bain's great treatise, had attempted to
re-introduce a better mode of philosophizing, latterly with quite as
much success as could be expected; but I had for some time felt that the
mere contrast of the two philosophies was not enough, that there ought
to be a hand-to-hand fight between them, that controver