BOOK IV. Rational Psychology:

RATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE

CHAPTER I

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

§ 1. The various sciences which deal with the interpretation of human life all avail themselves of the fundamental categories of Psychology. Hence we must ask how the concepts of Psychology are related to actual experience. § 2. Psychology is a body of abstract descriptive formulæ, not a direct transcript of the individual processes of real life. It presupposes the previous construction of the physical order. § 3. The psychological conception of conscious life as a succession of “mental states” or “images” is a transformation of actual experience devised primarily to account for the experience of other subjects, and subsequently extended to my own. The transformation is effected by the hypothesis of “introjection.” §§ 4, 5. The logical justification of the psychological transformation of facts is twofold. The psychological scheme serves partly to fill up the gaps in our theories of physiological Mechanism, and also, in respect of the teleological categories of Psychology, to describe the course of human conduct in a form capable of ethical and historical appreciation. Psychology may legitimately employ both mechanical and teleological categories. § 6. The objections sometimes brought against the possibility of (a) psychological, (b) teleological description are untenable.

§ 1. The net result of our brief examination of some of the most important cosmological concepts has been to confirm us in the “idealistic” or “spiritualistic” interpretation of existence to which our first two books in principle committed us. The reader who has followed us so far with acquiescence will now be fully prepared to admit that we shall at least be nearer the truth in conceiving the universe as composed of sentient and purposive subjects of experience, akin in principle to the members of human society, than as constituted, entirely or in part, of mechanically interacting and interdependent elements. The acceptance of an idealist interpretation of the universe, however, still leaves us face to face with a number of problems of the gravest philosophical import. We have still to ask how in particular we can most truly conceive the systematic unity which is formed by the whole multiplicity of apparently more or less independent subjects of experience, what degree of permanence and individuality, so far as we can judge, belongs to ourselves as members of that system, and what light is thrown by our ethical, religious, and æsthetic aspirations and ideals on the concrete character of the whole system and on our own place in it. Again, before we can attack these momentous problems with any reasonable hope of success, we shall need to know which among the categories employed by the various sciences dealing with mental life are of fundamental significance, and what is the logical relation of those sciences to the concrete realities of immediate experience, and to the constructions of physical science. Only on the basis of a rational theory as to the purposes subserved by the various mental sciences, and the possible limitations imposed by those purposes on the use of the corresponding categories, can we decide how far the interpretation of existence as a whole in terms of Psychology, Sociology, or Ethics, is legitimate.

It is clear that the complete execution of the programme indicated in the previous paragraph would involve a systematic philosophical interpretation of the significance of human life for which some such name as the Metaphysics of Society or Metaphysics of History would be a more adequate designation than the traditional title of Rational Psychology. I have, however, retained the ancient name for this subdivision of our task, mainly on the ground that our own elementary discussion will be primarily concerned with those most simple and universal psychological concepts of which the various more concrete social and historical sciences make the same constant use as chemistry and the other physical sciences do of the mechanical concepts of mass, energy, velocity, etc. Whatever view we adopt of the precise degree of connection between Psychology on the one side and the various social and historical sciences on the other, it is at least manifest that Ethics, Sociology, History, and the rest all involve the constant use of such psychological categories as those of self, will, thought, freedom, and that thus any sound metaphysical interpretation of history and society must begin with investigation into the logical character of the science to which these concepts belong, just as a sound Metaphysic of nature had to start by an examination of the postulates of Mechanics. I suppose that there is no need to utter more than a passing word by way of reminder to the reader, that such an investigation presupposes the previous creation of a purely empirical science of Psychology. The business of Metaphysics with Psychology is not to dictate in advance how it must construct its view of the world, but to ascertain the logical character of the completed construction, and its relation to the general system of human knowledge.

§ 2. The Place of Psychology among the Sciences.—From the metaphysician’s point of view, it is of the utmost importance to recognise clearly and constantly that Psychology, like the other sciences, deals throughout not with the actual experiences of real subjects, but with “data” obtained by the artificial manipulation and transformation of actual experience into a shape dictated by certain special interests and purposes. This is a point upon which the idealist metaphysician, in particular, is peculiarly liable to go wrong when left to himself. Starting with the conviction that the key to the nature of existence as a whole is to be found in our own direct experience of our sentient and purposive life, he almost inevitably tends, unless he has given particular attention to the methodology of psychological science, to take it for granted that the concepts and hypotheses of the psychologist afford a description of this experience in its concrete directness, and may therefore be treated without misgiving as a fruitful source of certain knowledge about the inmost structure of the absolute or infinite individual itself. And even the reiterated demonstration that one or another of the current categories of Psychology cannot be predicated of the absolute whole of reality without flagrant contradiction, frequently fails to produce conviction where it is not accompanied by direct proof of the artificiality and remoteness from concrete actuality of the psychologist’s data. Hence it would be worse than useless to discuss such questions as, whether the infinite individual can properly be thought of as a “self” or an “ethical person,” or again as a “society of ethical persons,” or again whether finite “selves” are “eternal” or only transitory constituents of the world-system, without first arriving at some definite view as to the way in which these psychological concepts are derived from the concrete actualities of experience, the special interests which lead to their formulation, and the restrictions imposed by those interests on the sphere of their valid application.

That Psychology, like all descriptive science, deals throughout with data which are not concrete experience-realities, but artificial products of a process of abstraction and reconstruction, should be sufficiently clear from the very consideration that, like the other sciences, it is a body of general descriptions of typical situations. An actual process of knowing or acting, like every actual event, is always individual, and because of its individuality defies adequate description. It is only in so far as a situation admits of being generalised by the selection of certain of its aspects or qualities as representative of its whole reality, that it is capable of being described at all. Even History and Biography, in which the teleological interpretation of a series of events as internally united by the singleness of the purpose underlying them takes the place of external connection in accord with mechanical laws of sequence as the ideal of explanation, are only possible on the condition that such transformation of the concrete realities of life as is implied in such a degree of abstraction and reconstruction can be carried out without detriment to the special interests of the historian and the biographer. And Psychology is unreal and abstract even as compared with history. It provides us with general formulæ which are, or should be, valuable as affording a means of describing certain universal features of the processes of willing and knowing which it is desirable to study in isolation, but it is of itself as incapable of adequately tracing the actual course of a real process of willing or thinking, as Mechanics is of following the actual course of a real individual process in “external” nature. In this respect the concepts and formulæ of scientific Psychology stand on precisely the same footing, as regards their relation to the individual and actual, as do those of scientific Physics. Their truth and validity means simply that by substituting them for concrete actualities we can get answers to certain special questions which we have an interest in solving, not that they are unaltered transcripts of the actualities themselves.

This is perhaps most strikingly shown by observing that the very existence of Psychology as a distinct branch of science presupposes that artificial severance of the unity of direct experience into a physical order and a non-physical realm external to that order, of which we have already investigated the origin. Psychology has no subject-matter at all until we have first, for the practical reasons already discussed, constructed the physical order by the inclusion in it of all those experience-contents which are equally accessible under specified conditions to the observation of a plurality of subjects, and then gone on to assign to the realm of “psychical” or “mental” existence whatever experience-contents fall outside the system so defined. And this whole separation of the physical and the psychical or mental, as we have already seen, has no place in the direct experience of actual life. In actual life, until we come to reconstruct it in thought for the purposes of description and calculation, there are neither material bodies nor “immaterial minds” or “consciousnesses” which are “in” them or “animate” them; there are simply sentient and purposive beings and the environment of things to which they have to adjust themselves in the execution of their purposes. How and for what reasons this naïvely realistic view of existence comes to give place to the dualistic conception of a physical world and a plurality of non-physical beings in relation with it, we have already seen in our study of the methodology of the physical sciences. We have now to follow the development of the dualistic line of thought somewhat further, before we can see precisely what is the character of the logical reconstruction of actual experience presupposed by the existence of a science of Psychology.

§ 3. As we have already learned, our recognition of the actuality of our own and our fellow-men’s life of unique and incommunicable feeling compelled us to admit the existence of much that, from its incommunicable nature, falls outside the sphere of physical reality. We have now to see how Psychology, in taking this non-physical existence as its subject-matter, conceives of its mode of existence and its relation to the subject-matter of the physical sciences. In recent years, much light has been thrown upon the methodological problem in question by the labours of Avenarius and his followers, from whom the substance of our account will be largely drawn. What Avenarius has for the first time made perfectly clear is, that the psychological interpretation of our own experience is throughout based upon reading into that experience a theory originally devised to meet a difficulty suggested by the existence of our fellow-men.

We have already seen, in dealing with the subjectivist’s fallacy, what this difficulty is. So long as I am concerned only with the analysis of my own experience, there is nothing to suggest the distinction between a physical and a psychical aspect of existence. All that I require, or rather all that I should require had I any interest in analysing my own experience independent of the need for intercommunication, is the simpler and more primitive distinction between myself as one thing in the world and the other things which form my environment. But the case is altered when I come, after the creation of the concept of a physical order, to analyse the experience of my fellow-men. My fellow-men, on the one hand, belong to the physical order, and, as belonging to it, are known to me as objects cognisable through my senses. On the other hand, it is necessary for all the purposes of practical intercourse to credit them with the same kind of sentience and feeling which I directly know in myself. This sentience and feeling are, of course, inaccessible to the perception of my own senses; I can see my fellow’s eye and can hear his voice, but I cannot see that he sees or hear that he hears. My fellow thus comes to be thought of as having a double existence; besides that aspect of him in which he is simply one among other things perceived, or in principle perceptible, by my senses, he has another aspect, not directly perceptible but necessarily presupposed in all social relation with him. On the side of his body he belongs entirely to the physical order; but there is, associated with this bodily existence, another side to him which I call his psychical aspect. Now, how must this “psychical aspect” be supposed to be constituted when once it has come to be thus artificially separated in thought from the physical side of my fellow’s existence? It is here that the theory of “introjection,” as worked out by Avenarius, comes to our aid.

When I perceive any object directly, without sophisticating myself by devising psychological hypotheses about the process, what I am aware of is, on the one side, the thing as a constituent of my environment, and, on the other, a variety of movements or impulses to movement in myself, marked by a peculiar tone of satisfied or dissatisfied feeling, and determined by the relation in which the thing in question stands to my various interests. But when I come to explain to myself what is meant by my fellow-man’s assertion that he also perceives the same object, a difficulty seems to arise which renders this simple analysis inadequate. The perceived object, the sun for example, appears to belong to my world of sensible things, for I too see the sun. Not so my fellow-man’s perception of it; as I cannot “see him seeing the sun,” so to say, I find it hard to understand how the sun, which is a thing in my sensible world, can be an object for his perception, which is not in my sensible world. Hence I draw the inference that while I see the actual sun, the content of my fellow’s perception is an image or idea of the sun (cf. p. 81).

By the extension of this process of inference I come to think of the non-physical aspect of my fellow’s existence as consisting, as a whole, of a vast complex of successive ideas or images, attended with their characteristic tone of satisfied and dissatisfied feeling; as this series of “mental states” or “ideas” has now to be represented as in some way related to the sensible physical reality I call my fellow’s body, I imagine it as going on “within” his skin somewhere, and thus arrive at the conception of my fellow as a dualistic compound of a physical factor, perceptible by my senses, his body, and a non-physical factor, composed of a stream of “mental images,” and imperceptible to sense, his mind. One further step remains to be taken and the work of “introjection” is complete. That step is the artificial re-interpretation of my own experience in terms of the distinction I have been led to establish for the case of my fellow. I come to think of my own conscious life in terms of the distinction between body and mind, and to analyse what as originally experienced was the direct reaction of a unitary self upon the things which formed its environment into a succession of “mental states” or “images” going on “within” a body, their relation to which will yet form a prominent scientific problem.

Now, it is only when this process of “introjection” has reached its final issue, and the actual life of sentient purposive intercourse with the other actual things of our environment has been replaced in thought by the conception of a mental succession of “images” or “contents of consciousness,” taken to “refer” to “things” which are themselves “outside consciousness,” while the felt unity of experience has given way to the radical sundering of human existence into a physical and a psychical aspect, that we have reached the point of view from which psychological science takes its departure. Only when the actualities of experience have been artificially transformed into “mental states” or “images” of actualities by the hypothesis of “introjection,” and thus definitely constituted into a non-physical order, have we the materials for the construction of a special science of the “psychical side” of our nature. Psychology, in fact, presupposes “psychical states” as the material of its studies, and “psychical states” are not data of immediate experience, but symbols derived from and substituted for the actual data of experience by an elaborately artificial method of transformation. Hence we should be committing a grave fallacy in Logic if we were to argue that since subjects of experience are the sole real things, the hypotheses of Psychology must be the final metaphysical truth about the world.

When we attempt to criticise the logical validity of the process of “introjection,” and the scientific constructions of a Psychology built up on an introjectionist foundation, we cannot fail to observe certain apparent gross breaches of logic which affect it. In the first place, the fundamental assumption that my fellow’s “mental life” is composed of “images” of the actual things of my own experience, is clearly at variance with the principle previously implied in the construction, for purposes of co-operation, of the physical order as composed of things equally accessible to the perception of a plurality of individuals. This discrepancy is once more done away with, when the process of introjection has been completed, by the reduction of my own mental life to a succession of images or states of consciousness, but only at the cost of forgetting that the original motive to “introjection” was a supposed disparity between my own and my fellow’s relation to the physical things of my environment.

Hence it is not strange that Avenarius should apparently hold the whole introjectionist transformation of the “naïvely realistic” standpoint to be essentially fallacious, and should close his discussion of the subject with the proposition that all attempts to vary the “natural view of the world” lead to superfluities or contradictions. It does not, however, seem necessary to follow him in this unfavourable judgment. Indeed, if we reflect that such a thorough-going rejection of all the results of introjection must involve as a consequence the repudiation of the whole science of Psychology, a science which may fairly be said to be at present about as fully justified by its successful growth as most of the physical sciences, we shall probably be inclined to hold that a process so fruitful in results must have its logical justification, however artificial the assumptions upon which it rests.

§ 4. What, then, is the logical justification for that elaborate transformation of experience which is necessary to bring it into the form presupposed by psychological science? In principle the question is not hard to answer. The “ideas,” “mental states,” and so forth, of Psychology are, as we have seen, symbols which we substitute for certain concrete actualities, and, like all symbols, they only partially correspond to the material they symbolise. But, like other symbols, they are admissible as substitutes for the things symbolised on two conditions: (1) that the individual symbol corresponds to that which it symbolises according to a definite and unambiguous scheme, and (2) that the substitution of the symbol for the thing symbolised is required in order to make the latter amenable to such manipulation as is necessary for the solution of some particular class of problem. Now, there can be no doubt that the first of these conditions is fulfilled by the translation of our actual experience into the introjectionist symbols of Psychology. For in the external or “physical” events which correspond to a “mental state,” I possess an unambiguous means of recognising the actual experience for which the mental state in question stands in the symbolism of Psychology. If the various physical “conditions” and forms of “expression” of the mental state are indicated with sufficient fulness and accuracy, they enable me to identify the corresponding actual experience when it occurs in my own life, or even to produce it experimentally for the express purpose of interpreting the Psychologist’s symbolism. The only question, then, that can reasonably be raised as to the legitimacy of psychological symbolism, is the question whether such a transformation of the actualities of immediate experience is demanded for the attainment of some specific purpose or interest.

It seems, I think, that the transformation is really required for more purposes than one. In the first place, one obvious use of psychological hypotheses is that, like the hypotheses of physical science, they assist us to calculate the course of events, in so far as it is independent of purposive interference of our own, and thus to form prudential rules for our own guidance in so interfering. This seems to be the principal use of those parts of Psychology which deal with the more mechanical aspects of mental life, e.g., the laws of the formation of fixed habits and associations by repetition, the gradual passing of voluntary into involuntary attention, and so forth. We are interested in studying the laws of habit and association, just as we are in formulating mechanical laws of physical nature, because we require to guide ourselves by such knowledge whenever we directly and intentionally interfere in the life of our fellows for educational, punitive, or general social purposes. Unless we can forecast the way in which our fellow will continue to act, so far as his behaviour is not modified by fresh purposive initiative, we shall be helpless to decide how we must intervene in his life to produce a given desired effect. Similarly, the direct moulding of our own future in a desired direction would be impossible apart from such knowledge of what that future is likely to be without intentional direction.

It may be said, of course, with justice, that, so far as Psychology presents us with such routine uniformities of succession, it is a mere supplementary device for making good the defects in our anatomical and physiological knowledge. If our physiological science were only sufficiently extensive and minute, we might reasonably expect to be able to describe the whole course of human action, so far as it is amenable to mechanical law, and exhibits routine uniformity in purely physiological terms. Instead of talking about the “association” of “ideas” or the production of a “habit” by repetition, we should then, for instance, be able to describe in physiological terminology the changes effected in a cerebral tract by the simultaneous excitement of two nervous centres, and to write the complete history of the process by which a permanent “conduction-path” arises from the reiteration of the excitement. Such a definite substitution of physiological for psychological hypotheses is pretty evidently the goal which the modern “experimental Psychology” has set before itself, and which it is constantly trying to persuade itself it has reached, in respect of some parts at least of its subject.

Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that, since the physiological counterpart of a routine uniformity of mental sequence must itself clearly be a routine uniformity, all psychological laws of uniform mechanical sequence might be ultimately replaced by their physiological equivalents, if only our knowledge of the structure and functions of the nervous system were sufficiently advanced. Hence Professor Münsterberg is perfectly self-consistent in arguing from the premisses that the sole function of psychological science is to provide us with mechanical uniformities of sequence by the aid whereof to calculate the future behaviour of our fellows, in so far as it is not modified by fresh purposive initiative, to the conclusion that the whole of Psychology is a temporary stop-gap by which we eke out our defective Physiology, but which must sooner or later cease to be of use, and therefore cease to exist as Physiology advances.

It would, of course, remain true, even if we were to accept this view of the case without reservation, that Psychology is, in the present state of our knowledge, an indispensable adjunct to Physiology. For, while our knowledge of the physiology of the nervous system is at present too fragmentary and vague to be of much practical use in enabling us to forecast even the simplest sequences in the behaviour of our fellows, Psychology is, temporarily at least, in many respects in a more advanced condition. Thus, if it were necessary, before we could infer the probable effects of exposure to a particular stimulus on a man’s behaviour, to frame a workable hypothesis as to the physiological occurrences in the nervous system between the first reception of the stimulus and the issuing of the ultimate bodily reaction, we should still be waiting helplessly for the means of framing the simplest general judgments as to the probable effects of our actions on our social circle. This is because the nervous changes intervening between the reception of the stimulus and the reaction can only be rendered accessible to observation by devices which postulate for their invention an extremely advanced condition of physical science in general and of Physiology in particular. There is no direct method of translating the actual processes which we experience into an unambiguous physiological symbolism, or, vice versâ, of testing a physiological hypothesis by retranslating it into facts of direct living experience. On the other hand, when we have given the assumed conditions of the occurrence of the stimulus, it is comparatively easy to observe what follows on them in actual life, and to translate it into the introjectionist Psychology, or, vice versâ, to test a theory couched in terms of that Psychology by comparison with the actualities of experience.

For this reason psychological hypotheses are, in the present state of knowledge, an indispensable mediating link between actual experience and physiological theory, and if ever they should come to be finally superseded by purely physiological descriptions of human conduct, we may be sure that the triumphant physiological theories will themselves first have been won by the process of establishing psychological formulæ and then seeking their physiological analogues. This is illustrated in the actual history of contemporary science by the extent to which the cerebral physiologists are dependent for their conception of the structure of the nervous system on the previous results of purely psychological investigation. We might present the mutual relations of concrete experience, Psychology and nervous Physiology, in an epigrammatic form, by saying that the connecting link between the subject of experience and the brain of Physiology is the “mind” or “consciousness” of Psychology.

§ 5. It is, I think, questionable whether such a view as Professor Münsterberg’s does full justice to the interests which prompt us to the construction of the psychological symbolism. On his theory, Psychology, it will be seen, is essentially a science of routine or mechanical uniformities of sequence, just like the various branches of mechanical Physics. According to him, teleology must be ruthlessly banished from scientific Psychology. In other words, though all the actual processes of direct experience are pervaded by teleological unity of interest or purpose, yet in substituting our psychological symbols for the actualities we must deprive them of every vestige of this teleological character. Nor is this demand that Psychology shall translate experience into a series of non-purposive routine sequences an arbitrary one on Professor Münsterberg’s part. If the sole function of Psychology is to facilitate calculation and prediction of the course of events, so far as it is not controlled by purposive interference, Psychology must, of course, either follow rigidly mechanical lines in its descriptions, or fail of its object. But I would suggest that over and above this function of facilitating calculation and prediction at present fulfilled by Psychology as locum tenens for a perfected Physiology, Psychology has another and an entirely distinct function, in which it would be impossible for it to be replaced by Physiology or by any other branch of study. This function is that of affording a set of symbols suitable for the description, in abstract general terms, of the teleological processes of real life, and thus providing Ethics and History and their kindred studies with an appropriate terminology.

It is manifest enough that neither the ethical appreciation of human conduct by comparison with an ideal standard, nor the historical interpretation of it in the light of the actual ends and ideals which pervade it and give it its individuality, would be possible unless we could first of all describe the events with which Ethics and History are conceived in teleological language. Apart from the presence throughout those events of more or less conscious striving towards an ideal end, there would be nothing in them for the moralist to applaud or blame, or for the historian to interpret. Thus, if Ethics and History are to have their subject-matter, there must be some science which describes the processes of human life and conduct in terms of teleological relation to an end. Now, to what science can we go for such descriptions? From our previous examination of the postulates of physical science, it is clear that the requisite material cannot be afforded by any branch of physical science which remains rigidly consistent with its own postulates. The nature of the interests in response to which the concept of the physical order was constructed, as we saw, required that the physical order should be thought of and described in terms of rigid mechanism. Hence no science which describes the processes of human life in purely physical terminology can indicate their purposive or teleological character in its descriptions. The purposive character of human conduct, if recognised at all in our descriptions, must find its recognition in that science which describes the aspect of human experience that is in principle excluded from the physical order. In other words, it is Psychology to which we have to go for such a general abstract conception of teleological unity as is necessary for the purposes of the more concrete sciences of Ethics and History.

This function of Psychology is indeed quite familiar to the student of the moral and historical sciences. In Ethics, as Professor Sidgwick has observed, the whole vocabulary used to characterise human conduct, apart from the specially ethical predicates of worth, is purely psychological. All the material which Ethics pronounces “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong”—“acts,” “feelings,” “tempers,” “desire,” etc.,—it has taken over bodily from Psychology. And so, too, History would have nothing left to appreciate if a record of merely physical movements were substituted for accounts of events which imply at every turn the psychological categories of “desire,” “purpose,” “intention,” “temptation,” and the rest. Universally, we may say all the teleological categories of human thought on examination prove to be either avowedly the property of Psychology, or, as is the case with the concepts of biological evolutionism, thinly disguised borrowings from it.

If this is so, we seem to be justified in drawing certain important inferences. (1) It will follow that of the two distinct offices which Psychology at present fulfils, one belongs to it, so to say, in its own right and inalienably, while the other is exercised by it temporarily, pending the majority of Cerebral Physiology. While, as we have seen, those parts of psychological doctrine which are concerned with the more mechanical aspects of conduct may ultimately be replaced by Physiology, the parts which deal with the initiation of fresh purposive adjustments, such as the psychology of attention and of feeling, are in principle irreducible to Physiology, and must retain a permanent value so long as mankind continues to be interested in the ethical and historical appreciation of human life.

(2) It will also follow that, at present and for long enough to come, Psychology is bound, pace Professor Münsterberg, to use both mechanical and teleological hypotheses and categories. Such a mixture of two different logical standpoints would no doubt be intolerable in a science which owed its existence to the need of satisfying a single interest of our nature. For the kind of interest which is met by mechanical hypotheses is baffled by the introduction of teleological modes of thought, and vice versâ. But, according to our view, the interest to which Psychology owes its creation is not single but double. We have an interest in the mechanical forecasting of human action, and an interest in its ethical and historical interpretation, and Psychology, as at present constituted, has to satisfy both these conflicting interests at once. Hence the impossibility of confining it either to purely mechanical or to purely teleological categories. If, indeed, our Physiology had reached the point of ideal completeness, so that every routine uniformity at present expressed in psychological terminology as the establishment of an “association” or “habit” could be translated into its physiological correlate, we should be able to dispense altogether with psychological hypotheses as aids to the calculation of the course of events, and to restore logical unity to Psychology by confining it entirely to the task of providing Ethics and History with the teleological categories they require for the description of their subject-matter. But such a reform of method would be most premature in the present condition of our physiological knowledge.

§ 6. There are two points of difficulty which our discussion has so far failed to deal with, but must not leave entirely unnoticed. We have allowed ourselves to assume (a) that description in psychological terms, and (b) that description in teleological terms, are possible. Both these assumptions have been questioned, and it is clear that if the first is unsound there can be no science of Psychology at all, while, if the second is unsound, Psychology cannot use teleological conceptions. Hence it is absolutely necessary to attempt some justification of our position on both questions.

As to (a), it has been argued that since only that which is accessible on equal terms to the perception of a plurality of subjects can be described by one subject to another, and since all objects so accessible to the perception of a plurality of subjects were included in our construction of the physical order, description can only be of physical objects. A “mental state” must be in principle incapable of description, because it can only be experienced by one subject.

Now, if Psychology claimed to be the direct description of immediate experience, as it is experienced, this contention would certainly be fatal to its very existence. But, as we have seen, Psychology makes no such claim. Its data are not the actualities of immediate experience themselves, but symbols derived from those actualities by a certain process of transformation. And though what Psychology calls its “facts” cannot, of course, like physical facts, be directly exhibited to the sense-perception of a plurality of subjects, we have in the physical conditions and concomitants of a “mental state” assignable marks by which we may recognise when it occurs in our own life, the actual experience of which the psychologist’s “mental state” is the symbol. Thus, though I cannot directly produce for inspection a sample of what in Psychology I call “the sensation of red,” I can indirectly, by assigning the upper and lower limits of the wave-length corresponding to the sensation, make every one understand what actual experience I am thinking of when I use the term.

(b) The second difficulty need not detain us long. The view that all description must be exclusively mechanical, rests upon the assumption that no other kind of description will answer the purpose for the sake of which we set out to describe things. Now, so far as description is undertaken for the purpose of establishing practical rules for intervention in the course of occurrences, this assumption is perfectly justified. If we are to lay down general rules for meddling in the course of events, we must of course assume that, apart from our meddling, it goes on with routine regularity. And we have already seen that for this very reason the mechanical interpretation of Nature is a fundamental postulate of physical science, so long as it confines itself strictly to the work of formulating “laws of Nature,” and does not attempt the task of historical appreciation. But, as we have also seen, the historical appreciation of a series of events as marked by the progressive execution of an underlying plan or purpose, is only possible when the events themselves have been described in essentially teleological terms as processes relative to ends. Hence we have no right to contend that all scientific descriptions shall be of the mechanical type, unless we are also prepared to maintain that the only purpose they subserve is that of the formulation of general rules for practice.

If the historical appreciation of events is a legitimate human interest, the description of events in terms of end and purpose must also be a legitimate form of description. Now, in point of fact, even the “physical sciences” themselves, when they come to deal with the facts of organic life, largely desert the primary scientific ideal of the formation of general laws for the historical ideal of the detection of lines of individual development, and if our previous conclusions are correct, it is much more for the latter than for the former purpose that we are interested in the construction of a science of Psychology. What a human being wants Psychology for, in the main, is not so much to help him to forecast the behaviour of other men, as to assist him to understand how the successive stages of his own individual development and that of his “social environment” are knit into a unity by the presence of all-pervading permanent interests and ends. The contention that psychological description must, on grounds of logical method, be of the mechanical type, seems therefore to repose on misconception as to the uses of Psychology.

The preceding discussion may perhaps appear somewhat arid and wearisome, but it was indispensable that our subsequent examination of the metaphysical problems suggested by the recognition of the psychical realm of existence should be based upon a definite view as to the connection between psychological conceptions and the actualities of experience, and such a view, in its turn, presupposes a positive theory of the interests to which psychological construction ministers and the logical procedure by which it is affected. The general result of our investigation has gone to show negatively that Psychology is not a direct transcript of real experience, but an intellectual reconstruction involving systematic abstraction from and transformation of experience, and positively that the reconstruction depends for its legitimacy upon its serviceableness for the special purposes, partly of the practical anticipation of events, but principally of their historical and ethical appreciation. The significance of those conclusions will be more apparent in the course of the two following chapters.

Consult further:—R. Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbegriff; F. H. Bradley, “A Defence of Phenomenalism in Psychology” (Mind, January 1900); H. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. chap. 2 (The Epistemological Basis of Psychology), 11 (Connection through the Body); J. Ward, Art. “Psychology” in Encyclopædia Britannica, ad init. (“The Standpoint of Psychology”); Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. lect. 16.

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Footnote 168:

See Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, p. 115 ad fin.

Footnote 169:

Or rather, like all symbols which are not identical with the things they represent. In the latter case, as when, e.g., for any purpose I count the numbers of the natural number series themselves, beginning with 1, there may appear to be complete correspondence. But the usefulness of the process depends on the fact that the 1 which I count and the 1 by which I count it are at least numerically distinct—how much more distinction this implies I do not stay to discuss here—and hence, I take it, it is by an abuse of language that the process is called “representation of a thing by itself.”

Footnote 170:

See Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. chap. 11, pp. 415-436.

Footnote 171:

This is strikingly illustrated by the procedure of Professor Münsterberg himself. He expels selective interest from his psychological account of attention, in obedience to the principle that teleological ideas must be kept out of a descriptive science, and then, when confronted with the problem what it is that does decide what presentations shall actually be attended to, makes the selection a function of the sub-cortical motor-centres in the brain, thus reintroducing into biology the teleological categories previously declared inadmissible. See Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. chap. 15, pp. 525-562. I may once more note, for the benefit of the reader who is interested in methodology, that whereas the processes of the mechanical sciences are essentially continuous, the teleological processes of finite life as conceived by ethical and historical science appear, as Professor Royce has insisted, to be of the nature of discontinuous series, i.e. to consist of terms between which intermediate links cannot be interpolated. Why I cannot accept what appears to be Professor Royce’s view, that ultimate Reality itself is a discontinuous series, will perhaps be clear from Chap. 3 and the following chapter of the present Book. But see also the Supplementary Note at the end of the present chapter.

Footnote 172:

Psychology is, of course, far from being the only branch of study which, in its present state, employs categories of both types. Compare the constant use made in biological evolutionary theories of the teleological ideas of, e.g., the “struggle for existence,” the “survival of the fittest,” “sexual selection,” etc., ideas bodily conveyed from Sociology and Psychology. As we have just seen, the precisians who object to this mixture of higher and lower categories in Psychology are in the awkward predicament of only being able to get rid of it there by accentuating its presence in Physiology and Biology. Where they go wrong is in exaggerating the amount of logical unity attributable to any body of inquiries which happens, in virtue of being pursued by the same men and with the same accessories, to be called by a common name. It would require only a slight further exaggeration to argue that since all branches of knowledge are alike knowledge, they must be all either exclusively mechanical or exclusively teleological. There is no reason in the nature of things why “Psychology” should not at a particular period in the growth of knowledge cover as wide a range of inquiries, with as much internal variety of aim and method, as, say “Mathematics.”

Footnote 173:

And they cannot be so described without the introduction of psychological ideas. Thus, e.g., in classifying a series of implements dating from different periods in the history of civilisation, so as to throw light on the evolution of some particular type of tool or machine, we have to take as our fundamentum divisionis the adequacy with which the different varieties accomplish the kind of work they were designed to perform, and are thus committed at once to the use of the psychological concepts of purpose and satisfaction.

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SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER I.

ON THE DISCONTINUITY OF THE TELEOLOGICAL SERIES OF ETHICS AND HISTORY.

We have previously seen that every continuous series is indefinitely divisible, and that consequently no two terms of such a series are immediately coadjacent. On the other hand, any series which consists of terms which are immediately coadjacent, and between which intermediate terms of the same series cannot be inserted, is not indefinitely divisible, and a fortiori not continuous. Applying this to the case of a series of psychical processes, we can see that where the sequence is of a mechanical routine type it is continuous, since it can be indefinitely divided into smaller fragments, each exhibiting the same law of sequence as the whole. (Strictly, it ought to be added that the other condition of continuity is also fulfilled, since whatever point of time thus divides the sequence falls within the series itself.) But where you have new teleological adaptation there is a manifest solution of this continuity. The new purpose emerges at a definite point in the sequence: what has gone before up to this point belongs to the working out of a different interest or purpose, what comes after to the working out of the now freshly emerged interest. Each may form a continuous process within itself, but the transition from the one to the other is not continuous. There is where the old purposive series ends and the new one begins, a genuine case of immediate coadjacency of terms between which intermediate members cannot be interposed.

In another connection, it would, I think, be easy to show how this consideration is of itself fatal to the reality of Time. My point here is simply to maintain that the facts just referred to do not warrant the inference that “ultimate Reality” or “the Absolute” is for itself a discontinuous series. My objection to this view is that the “emergence of new selective interest” is itself essentially a feature of the finite experience which, because finite, appears in a temporal form. The distinction between the “new” and the “habitual” has no meaning for a completed and infinite experience, which embraces all existence in a perfectly harmonious form. Or, to put it in another way, the serial form of arrangement itself has no significance except for an experience which has to advance progressively from one stage to another of partial insight and comprehension. This seems as true of “logical” order or ethical order of valuation according to moral worth as of merely numerical order. In fact, we said in Book II. chap. 4, § 10, that the serial arrangement is the simplest and most general expression of that relational mode of apprehension which we decided to be at once inevitable for finite knowledge and inadequate to express Reality. It is on this ground that I feel obliged, as I understand the problem at present, to hold that ultimate Reality is neither a continuous nor a discontinuous series, for the reason that it is not for itself a series at all.