Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/45

A DEFENCE OF PHENOMENALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY. 31 Everything is thus so far an event which has a place in my history and is predicable of me. That which is not so pre- dicable is the mere connexion of the ideal content with the reality, so far as that connexion is taken by itself, and so far as abstraction is made of any other aspect. Certainly, then, I agree that, so far as this abstraction is maintained, we have not to do with an event in my soul, but I add also that we have to do with something which falls outside of psychology. On the other hand the idea or the judgment, if you take it in any fuller sense, is assuredly a psychical event. You may go on to urge, if you please, that at any rate cognition proper is not explicable ; but that is a point to be discussed within psychology, and at any rate here it is perfectly irrelevant. However much a thing is inexplicable that hardly proves that it does not happen and is no event. A truth, we may say, is no truth at all unless it happens in a soul and is thus an event which appears in time. As it there exists, and as by existing there it influences the future history of that soul, it is a matter for psychology and for the psychology that confines itself strictly to phenomenalism. But as anything less than this or anything more than this it does not fall within psychology, that is if there are to be any limits set to psychology at all. 1 "But," it may be further said, "let us take such a case as the following : A mind may make the Deity its object and may so, as we say, be ' converted '. Now the Deity is not an event, and is not so thought of, and does not in that character influence the mind. But yet this influence, what- ever else it may be, is clearly psychological, and at the same time falls outside your psychology." But no, I reply, this is once more nothing but misunderstanding and confusion. The Deity is not a mere event of course, and of course the Deity is really present in the mind that makes it an object, and it is really present not as an event, and it really exer- cises in this non-temporal character psychological influence. This is all true, and yet it does not prevent something else from also being true. The presence in the soul of what is 1 If I speculate psychologically about myself, it may be said in this case that psychology is concerned with my judgment in every sense, both as it exists and as it is true or false. Certainly this is so, but this once more would be irrelevant. Psychology is indeed interested here in the truth or falsehood of my judgment, as well as in its personal history and existence. But so far as concerned here with truth psychology is con- cerned with it not as mine, but abstracts wholly from that side of it. And the truth therefore will so far not be a fact or object to psychology at all, but part of its own impersonal attitude towards its object and part of its own way of dealing with that.