exercise; for if you were merely occupied in making the most simple calculation, what would become of your internal observation?  On the other hand, after having thus, by dint of many precautions, attained to a perfect state of intellectual slumber, you are to occupy yourself in contemplating the operations passing in your mind—­while there is no longer any thing passing there.  Our descendants will one day see these ludicrous pretensions transferred to the stage.”—­P. 34.

They seem transferred to the stage already—­so completely burlesqued is the whole process on which the psychologist bases his results.  He does not pretend to observe the mind itself; but he says, you can remember previous states of consciousness, whether of passion or of intellectual effort, and pay renewed attention to them.  And assuredly there is no difficulty in understanding this.  When, indeed, M. Cousin, after being much perplexed with the problem which Kant had thrown out to him, of objective and subjective truth, comes back to the public and tells them, in a second edition of his work, that he has succeeded in discovering, in the inmost recesses of the mind, and at a depth of the consciousness to which neither he nor any other had before been able to penetrate, this very sense of the absolute in truth of which he was in search—­something very like the account which M. Conte gives, may be applicable.  But when M. Cousin, or other psychologists, in the ordinary course of their investigations, observe mental phenomena, they simply pay attention to what memory brings them of past experiences; observations which are not only a legitimate source of knowledge, but which are continually made, with more or less accuracy, by every human being.  If they are impossible according to the doctrines of phrenology, let phrenology look to this, and rectify her blunder in the best way, as speedily as she can.  M. Comte may think fit to depreciate the labours of the metaphysician; but it is not to the experimental philosopher alone that he is indebted for that positive method which he expounds with so exclusive an enthusiasm.  M. Comte is a phrenologist; he adopts the fundamental principles of Gall’s system, but repudiates, as consummately absurd, the list of organs, and the minute divisions of the skull, which at present obtain amongst phrenologists.  How came he, a phrenologist, so far and no further, but from certain information gathered from his consciousness, or his memory, which convicted phrenology of error?  And how can he, or any other, rectify this erroneous division of the cranium, and establish a more reasonable one, unless by a course of craniological observations directed and confirmed by those internal observations which he is pleased here to deride?