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 minds so as to form a living
laboratory" _Mind_ vivisection without torture, cruelty or the knife.
What we want to know definitely from science is: How does this thing
which I call my mind work? Science regards mind as the sum of
sensations, which are the necessary results of antecedent causes. It
endeavours to know how and in what way these sensations can be trained
and perfected. Nearly twenty years ago, a writer in the Psychological