(2) In his analysis he often misses the main element of the concrete or complex phenomena.In referring ideas to sensation he neglects to consider how much is involved in body occupying space, and how much in body exercising property; and the account of memory he fails to discover how much is implied in recognizing the event remembered as having happened in time past,-that is, he omits the idea of time.Often, too, when he has accomplished an analysis of a complex state, does he forget the elements, and reminds us of the boy who imagines that be has annihilated a piece of paper when he has burnt it, forgetting that the elements are to be found in the smoke and in the ashes.It is by a most deceitful decomposition -- it is by missing the very <differentia> of the phenomena -- that he is able to derive all our intellectual ideas from sensation and simple and relative suggestion.
(3) He grants that there are intuitive principles of belief in the mind; but he has never so much as attempted an induction of them, or an exposition of their nature and of the laws which regulate them, or a classification of them.
In this respect he must be regarded as falling behind his predecessors in the school, and behind Hamilton, who succeeded him in the estimation of students of mental science.The intelligent reader is greatly disappointed to find him, after he has shown so forcibly that there is an intuition involved in our belief in personal identity and in causation, immediately dropping these intuitions and inquiring no more into their nature.He takes great credit for reducing the faculties and principles enumerated by Reid to a much smaller number; but if we gather up all the elements which he is obliged to bring in, we shall find the list to be as large as that of Reid or Stewart.{334}
(4) Thus he represents consciousness as merely a general term for all the states and affections of mind; and then, in order to account for our belief in the sameness of self, he is obliged to call in a special instinct." We believe our identity, as one mind, in our feelings of to-day and our feelings of yesterday, as indubitably as we believe that the fire which burned yesterday would in the same circumstances burn us to-day, not from reasoning, but from a principle of instinct and irresistible belief, such as gives to reasoning itself all its validity." It is this irresistible belief, involved in the very nature of consciousness, this belief in self and the identity of self, which makes consciousness -- I mean self-consciousness (and not a vague consciousness) -- a separate faculty.This faculty is a source to us of a separate set of cognitions and ideas, the knowledge of self and of the states of self, -- such as thinking, feeling, resolving.
(5) According to Brown, in perception through the senses we look immediately on a sensation in the mind, and not on any thing out of the mind.Hamilton has severely criticised this doctrine.Hamilton had a discriminately searching classification of the forms.which ideal sense-perception bad assumed, and he makes Brown's theory one of the forms of idealism.But the truth is, Brown's doctrine can scarcely be called idealism.It might be appropriately called inferentialism.It is the same substantially as that of Destutt de Tracy and the French ideologists, who, maintaining the existence of body, argued that infants reach a knowledge of it by a process of inference.The argument is unfolded by Brown at great length and with much ingenuity.