Mental science Author:Alexander Bain Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: no longer to be dealt with by the student in fragments, but as a vital whole. In place of the abstraction mind, is substituted the living being, compounded of mi... more »nd and body, to be contemplated, like any other object of science, as actually presented to our observation and in our experience. This enlargement of the domain of mental studies, while it is but a part of the general evolution of knowledge, relieves the subject of the reproach of emptiness, and places it at the head of all the sciences in the scale of direct and comprehensive utility. The study of Mind has always ranked as the noblest and most elevating of intellectual pursuits; but its questions can certainly lose nothmg in interest or dignity, as it is more and more clearly perceived that they involve the highest concernments of humanity. Nor are the benefits here claimed by any means still prospective; much has already been done. The labors of various eminent men of the present and past generation, euch as Sir Charles Bell, Marshall Hall, Sir Benjamin Bro- die, Drs. Laycock and Carpenter, Sir Heury Holland, Herbert Spencer, and others, have resulted in the establishment of a body of facts and principles in mental physiol- ogywhich has variously influenced the popular works upon mental philosophy from Abercrombie to the present time. But while the authors here enumerated have been mainlj occupied with the physiological elucidations, there was still wanting the thinker who, taking up the whole subject in an impartial spirit, and giving due weight to what is valuable in both the old statement and the new, should incorporate all the needed elements into a harmonious, comprehensive, and unitary scheme of Mental Science. Professor Bain has proved to be the man for this undertaking. He has a distinguished place among t...« less