Dr. J. B. Crozier | Nature


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ABSTRACT DR. JOHN BEATTIE CROZIER (born at Gait, Canada, on April 23, 1849; died in London on January 8) was a thinker who knew how to combine philosophic breadth with scientific substance.


His first master in speculative thought was Herbert Spencer, but he soon began to deviate from what he took to be the materialistic outcome of Spencer's psychology. The fault he found


was that Spencer, in investigating mind, failed to view it adequately except from the objective side, as correlated with the brain and nervous system. This correlation itself Crozier


accepted in the most thoroughgoing way; but, as the body is an organic unity, so also, he held, must the mind be unitary; and, by introspection, he found a “scale in the mind,” not unlike


that of the Platonic psychology, though it was for him an independent discovery. In this scale, truth, beauty, and love are at the top; such feelings as honour, ambition, and self-respect in


the middle; and such qualities as greed and, in general, animal appetite at the bottom. This led Crozier to a metaphysical doctrine (though he was inclined to repudiate the term


metaphysics) according to which the higher attributes of mind are superior not only in quality, but also, correspondingly, in ultimate strength. ARTICLE PDF ENJOYING OUR LATEST CONTENT?


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700 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/106700a0 Download citation * Published: 01 January 1921 * Issue Date: 27 January 1921 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106700a0 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Anyone


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