Note 484 — Chapter VII

Dissertations, p. 98. Compare Brown's Twenty-fourth Lecture with Tracy's Idéologie, ch. vii., and the account of the way in which the infant learns from resistance to infer a cause, and make of the cause un être qui n'est pas moi. The resemblance is certainly close. Brown was familiar with French literature, and shows it by many quotations, though he does not, I think, refer to Tracy. Brown, it must be noticed, did not himself publish his lectures, and a professor is not bound to give all his sources in popular lectures. An explanation would have been due in a treatise. Picavet quotes Rhétoré's Philosophie de Thomas Brown (a book which I have not seen) for the statement that Brown's lectures often read like a translation of Laromiguière, with whom Brown was 'perhaps' acquainted. As, however, the Leçons, to which reference is apparently made, did not appear till 1815 and 1818, when Brown's lectures were already written, this seems to be impossible. The coincidence, which to me seems to be exaggerated by the statement, is explicable by a common relation to previous writers.