Inasmuch as psychology deals with the mind, the spirit, the soul,
(provided there be such a thing), and with purely imponderable and
immaterial things generally, it is only natural that psychology
and philosophy should be closely related. Many of the problems of
metaphysics, as a matter of fact, deal with semi-psychological
problems; among which may be mentioned the relation of brain and mind,
free-will, the science of perceiving the reality of the outer world
(epistemology), etc. How an external object and the “idea” of that
object can ever be in any way “related” to one another, and how the
mind can see a definite “sameness” or similarity between the two is,
in fact, an extraordinary phenomenon. The idea of a beefsteak and the
beefsteak itself are, indeed, as dissimilar as possible; and yet the
two somehow correspond! This relationship is a remarkable fact, and
awaits a full solution.
Again, every night when we fall asleep, we lose our individuality,
in a sense; yet we are sure of waking up the next morning the same
“person” who went to sleep--with its memories, thoughts, ideas,
emotions, etc., practically unchanged. How do we know that we shall
do so? What guarantee have we that we shall wake up the same person
that went to sleep and not some one else? As a matter of fact, this
_does_ sometimes happen, in cases of alternating personality; but such
cases are exceptional, and the rule holds good. Yet consciousness is
constantly changing. We are not the same person that we were five, ten,
twenty years ago; we do not consider ourselves morally responsible, as
it were, for acts committed by ourselves, when children, any more than
if they had been committed by some one else. Nevertheless, underneath
all these changes and modifications, there seems to flow a stream of
“selfness,” or uniformity, binding the whole together, and we recognize
that Self as Ourself--behind and beyond all. What is the innermost
nature of that Self? What is its origin, its destiny? These are
questions which only the Science of the future can decide!