(1) We do not claim for the popular Psychology the position of a science
at all; it cannot, like the Physical Sciences, proceed by the Inductive
Method: it has not the necessity of Mathematics: it does not, like
Metaphysic, argue from abstract notions or from internal coherence. It
is made up of scattered observations. A few of these, though they may
sometimes appear to be truisms, are of the greatest value, and free
from all doubt. We are conscious of them in ourselves; we observe them
working in others; we are assured of them at all times. For example, we
are absolutely certain, (a) of the influence exerted by the mind over
the body or by the body over the mind: (b) of the power of association,
by which the appearance of some person or the occurrence of some event
recalls to mind, not always but often, other persons and events: (c)
of the effect of habit, which is strongest when least disturbed by
reflection, and is to the mind what the bones are to the body: (d) of
the real, though not unlimited, freedom of the human will: (e) of the
reference, more or less distinct, of our sensations, feelings, thoughts,
actions, to ourselves, which is called consciousness, or, when in
excess, self-consciousness: (f) of the distinction of the 'I' and 'Not
I,' of ourselves and outward objects. But when we attempt to gather up
these elements in a single system, we discover that the links by which
we combine them are apt to be mere words. We are in a country which
has never been cleared or surveyed; here and there only does a gleam of
light come through the darkness of the forest.
(2) These fragments, although they can never become science in the
ordinary sense of the word, are a real part of knowledge and may be of
great value in education. We may be able to add a good deal to them from
our own experience, and we may verify them by it. Self-examination
is one of those studies which a man can pursue alone, by attention to
himself and the processes of his individual mind. He may learn much
about his own character and about the character of others, if he will
'make his mind sit down' and look at itself in the glass. The great, if
not the only use of such a study is a practical one,--to know, first,
human nature, and, secondly, our own nature, as it truly is.
(3) Hence it is important that we should conceive of the mind in the
noblest and simplest manner. While acknowledging that language has been
the greatest factor in the formation of human thought, we must endeavour
to get rid of the disguises, oppositions, contradictions, which
arise out of it. We must disengage ourselves from the ideas which the
customary use of words has implanted in us. To avoid error as much as
possible when we are speaking of things unseen, the principal terms
which we use should be few, and we should not allow ourselves to be
enslaved by them. Instead of seeking to frame a technical language,
we should vary our forms of speech, lest they should degenerate into
formulas. A difficult philosophical problem is better understood when
translated into the vernacular.
I.a. Psychology is inseparable from language, and early language
contains the first impressions or the oldest experience of man
respecting himself. These impressions are not accurate representations
of the truth; they are the reflections of a rudimentary age of
philosophy. The first and simplest forms of thought are rooted so deep
in human nature that they can never be got rid of; but they have been
perpetually enlarged and elevated, and the use of many words has been
transferred from the body to the mind. The spiritual and intellectual
have thus become separated from the material--there is a cleft between
them; and the heart and the conscience of man rise above the dominion
of the appetites and create a new language in which they too find
expression. As the differences of actions begin to be perceived, more
and more names are needed. This is the first analysis of the human mind;
having a general foundation in popular experience, it is moulded to
a certain extent by hierophants and philosophers. (See Introd. to
Cratylus.)
b. This primitive psychology is continually receiving additions from the
first thinkers, who in return take a colour from the popular language
of the time. The mind is regarded from new points of view, and becomes
adapted to new conditions of knowledge. It seeks to isolate itself
from matter and sense, and to assert its independence in thought. It
recognizes that it is independent of the external world. It has five
or six natural states or stages:--(1) sensation, in which it is almost
latent or quiescent: (2) feeling, or inner sense, when the mind is just
awakening: (3) memory, which is decaying sense, and from time to time,
as with a spark or flash, has the power of recollecting or reanimating
the buried past: (4) thought, in which images pass into abstract notions
or are intermingled with them: (5) action, in which the mind moves
forward, of itself, or under the impulse of want or desire or pain,
to attain or avoid some end or consequence: and (6) there is the
composition of these or the admixture or assimilation of them in various
degrees. We never see these processes of the mind, nor can we tell the
causes of them. But we know them by their results, and learn from other
men that so far as we can describe to them or they to us the workings of
the mind, their experience is the same or nearly the same with our own.
c. But the knowledge of the mind is not to any great extent derived
from the observation of the individual by himself. It is the growing
consciousness of the human race, embodied in language, acknowledged
by experience, and corrected from time to time by the influence of
literature and philosophy. A great, perhaps the most important, part of
it is to be found in early Greek thought. In the Theaetetus of Plato it
has not yet become fixed: we are still stumbling on the threshold.
In Aristotle the process is more nearly completed, and has gained
innumerable abstractions, of which many have had to be thrown away
because relative only to the controversies of the time. In the interval
between Thales and Aristotle were realized the distinctions of mind and
body, of universal and particular, of infinite and infinitesimal, of
idea and phenomenon; the class conceptions of faculties and virtues, the
antagonism of the appetites and the reason; and connected with this, at
a higher stage of development, the opposition of moral and intellectual
virtue; also the primitive conceptions of unity, being, rest, motion,
and the like. These divisions were not really scientific, but rather
based on popular experience. They were not held with the precision of
modern thinkers, but taken all together they gave a new existence to the
mind in thought, and greatly enlarged and more accurately defined man's
knowledge of himself and of the world. The majority of them have been
accepted by Christian and Western nations. Yet in modern times we have
also drifted so far away from Aristotle, that if we were to frame a
system on his lines we should be at war with ordinary language and
untrue to our own consciousness. And there have been a few both in
mediaeval times and since the Reformation who have rebelled against the
Aristotelian point of view. Of these eccentric thinkers there have been
various types, but they have all a family likeness. According to them,
there has been too much analysis and too little synthesis, too much
division of the mind into parts and too little conception of it as a
whole or in its relation to God and the laws of the universe. They have
thought that the elements of plurality and unity have not been duly
adjusted. The tendency of such writers has been to allow the personality
of man to be absorbed in the universal, or in the divine nature, and to
deny the distinction between matter and mind, or to substitute one for
the other. They have broken some of the idols of Psychology: they have
challenged the received meaning of words: they have regarded the mind
under many points of view. But though they may have shaken the old, they
have not established the new; their views of philosophy, which seem like
the echo of some voice from the East, have been alien to the mind of
Europe.
d. The Psychology which is found in common language is in some degree
verified by experience, but not in such a manner as to give it
the character of an exact science. We cannot say that words always
correspond to facts. Common language represents the mind from different
and even opposite points of view, which cannot be all of them equally
true (compare Cratylus). Yet from diversity of statements and opinions
may be obtained a nearer approach to the truth than is to be gained
from any one of them. It also tends to correct itself, because it is
gradually brought nearer to the common sense of mankind. There are
some leading categories or classifications of thought, which, though
unverified, must always remain the elements from which the science or
study of the mind proceeds. For example, we must assume ideas before we
can analyze them, and also a continuing mind to which they belong;
the resolution of it into successive moments, which would say, with
Protagoras, that the man is not the same person which he was a minute
ago, is, as Plato implies in the Theaetetus, an absurdity.
e. The growth of the mind, which may be traced in the histories of
religions and philosophies and in the thoughts of nations, is one of the
deepest and noblest modes of studying it. Here we are dealing with the
reality, with the greater and, as it may be termed, the most sacred part
of history. We study the mind of man as it begins to be inspired by a
human or divine reason, as it is modified by circumstances, as it is
distributed in nations, as it is renovated by great movements, which go
beyond the limits of nations and affect human society on a scale still
greater, as it is created or renewed by great minds, who, looking down
from above, have a wider and more comprehensive vision. This is an
ambitious study, of which most of us rather 'entertain conjecture'
than arrive at any detailed or accurate knowledge. Later arises the
reflection how these great ideas or movements of the world have
been appropriated by the multitude and found a way to the minds of
individuals. The real Psychology is that which shows how the increasing
knowledge of nature and the increasing experience of life have always
been slowly transforming the mind, how religions too have been modified
in the course of ages 'that God may be all and in all.' E pollaplasion,
eoe, to ergon e os nun zeteitai prostatteis.
f. Lastly, though we speak of the study of mind in a special sense, it
may also be said that there is no science which does not contribute to
our knowledge of it. The methods of science and their analogies are new
faculties, discovered by the few and imparted to the many. They are
to the mind, what the senses are to the body; or better, they may be
compared to instruments such as the telescope or microscope by which the
discriminating power of the senses, or to other mechanical inventions,
by which the strength and skill of the human body is so immeasurably
increased.
II. The new Psychology, whatever may be its claim to the authority of a
science, has called attention to many facts and corrected many errors,
which without it would have been unexamined. Yet it is also itself
very liable to illusion. The evidence on which it rests is vague and
indefinite. The field of consciousness is never seen by us as a whole,
but only at particular points, which are always changing. The veil
of language intercepts facts. Hence it is desirable that in making an
approach to the study we should consider at the outset what are the
kinds of error which most easily affect it, and note the differences
which separate it from other branches of knowledge.
a. First, we observe the mind by the mind. It would seem therefore that
we are always in danger of leaving out the half of that which is the
subject of our enquiry. We come at once upon the difficulty of what is
the meaning of the word. Does it differ as subject and object in the
same manner? Can we suppose one set of feelings or one part of the mind
to interpret another? Is the introspecting thought the same with the
thought which is introspected? Has the mind the power of surveying its
whole domain at one and the same time?--No more than the eye can take in
the whole human body at a glance. Yet there may be a glimpse round the
corner, or a thought transferred in a moment from one point of view to
another, which enables us to see nearly the whole, if not at once,
at any rate in succession. Such glimpses will hardly enable us to
contemplate from within the mind in its true proportions. Hence the
firmer ground of Psychology is not the consciousness of inward feelings
but the observation of external actions, being the actions not only of
ourselves, but of the innumerable persons whom we come across in life.
b. The error of supposing partial or occasional explanation of
mental phenomena to be the only or complete ones. For example, we are
disinclined to admit of the spontaneity or discontinuity of the mind--it
seems to us like an effect without a cause, and therefore we suppose the
train of our thoughts to be always called up by association. Yet it is
probable, or indeed certain, that of many mental phenomena there are no
mental antecedents, but only bodily ones.
c. The false influence of language. We are apt to suppose that when
there are two or more words describing faculties or processes of the
mind, there are real differences corresponding to them. But this is not
the case. Nor can we determine how far they do or do not exist, or
by what degree or kind of difference they are distinguished. The same
remark may be made about figures of speech. They fill up the vacancy of
knowledge; they are to the mind what too much colour is to the eye; but
the truth is rather concealed than revealed by them.
d. The uncertain meaning of terms, such as Consciousness, Conscience,
Will, Law, Knowledge, Internal and External Sense; these, in the
language of Plato, 'we shamelessly use, without ever having taken the
pains to analyze them.'
e. A science such as Psychology is not merely an hypothesis, but
an hypothesis which, unlike the hypotheses of Physics, can never be
verified. It rests only on the general impressions of mankind, and there
is little or no hope of adding in any considerable degree to our stock
of mental facts.
f. The parallelism of the Physical Sciences, which leads us to analyze
the mind on the analogy of the body, and so to reduce mental operations
to the level of bodily ones, or to confound one with the other.
g. That the progress of Physiology may throw a new light on Psychology
is a dream in which scientific men are always tempted to indulge. But
however certain we may be of the connexion between mind and body, the
explanation of the one by the other is a hidden place of nature which
has hitherto been investigated with little or no success.
h. The impossibility of distinguishing between mind and body. Neither
in thought nor in experience can we separate them. They seem to act
together; yet we feel that we are sometimes under the dominion of the
one, sometimes of the other, and sometimes, both in the common use of
language and in fact, they transform themselves, the one into the good
principle, the other into the evil principle; and then again the 'I'
comes in and mediates between them. It is also difficult to distinguish
outward facts from the ideas of them in the mind, or to separate the
external stimulus to a sensation from the activity of the organ, or this
from the invisible agencies by which it reaches the mind, or any process
of sense from its mental antecedent, or any mental energy from its
nervous expression.
i. The fact that mental divisions tend to run into one another, and that
in speaking of the mind we cannot always distinguish differences of kind
from differences of degree; nor have we any measure of the strength and
intensity of our ideas or feelings.
j. Although heredity has been always known to the ancients as well as
ourselves to exercise a considerable influence on human character, yet
we are unable to calculate what proportion this birth-influence bears to
nurture and education. But this is the real question. We cannot pursue
the mind into embryology: we can only trace how, after birth, it begins
to grow. But how much is due to the soil, how much to the original
latent seed, it is impossible to distinguish. And because we are certain
that heredity exercises a considerable, but undefined influence, we must
not increase the wonder by exaggerating it.
k. The love of system is always tending to prevail over the historical
investigation of the mind, which is our chief means of knowing it. It
equally tends to hinder the other great source of our knowledge of the
mind, the observation of its workings and processes which we can make
for ourselves.
l. The mind, when studied through the individual, is apt to be
isolated--this is due to the very form of the enquiry; whereas, in
truth, it is indistinguishable from circumstances, the very language
which it uses being the result of the instincts of long-forgotten
generations, and every word which a man utters being the answer to some
other word spoken or suggested by somebody else.
III. The tendency of the preceding remarks has been to show that
Psychology is necessarily a fragment, and is not and cannot be a
connected system. We cannot define or limit the mind, but we can
describe it. We can collect information about it; we can enumerate the
principal subjects which are included in the study of it. Thus we are
able to rehabilitate Psychology to some extent, not as a branch of
science, but as a collection of facts bearing on human life, as a
part of the history of philosophy, as an aspect of Metaphysic. It is a
fragment of a science only, which in all probability can never make any
great progress or attain to much clearness or exactness. It is however
a kind of knowledge which has a great interest for us and is always
present to us, and of which we carry about the materials in our own
bosoms. We can observe our minds and we can experiment upon them, and
the knowledge thus acquired is not easily forgotten, and is a help to us
in study as well as in conduct.