Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/47

A DEFENCE OF PHENOMENALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY. 33 law of association, or a disposition, unless I can state these in a form which is ultimately and utterly true? It seems to me that such a question when once raised and once understood can only be answered in one way, and with this I will pass on. (vi.) " But psychology cannot," I may be told, " be a separate science, because these sciences each study separate compartments in the nature of things. On the other hand psychology has no such compartment, since there is nothing which falls outside the mind, and psychology therefore is not and cannot be a limited science." Now what conclusion really should follow from the premiss, if that were true, I will not discuss, for the whole premiss in my opinion is radically false. A limited science is not in principle made what it is by having a compartment to itself, but by studying whatever it studies with a limited end and in a limited way. If you ask for instance unconditionally what are matter and force, that is a question for metaphysics. It becomes a question for physics if you ask what they are for a certain limited purpose and in a certain limited sense. And exactly the same thing in principle holds with the science of mind. If you ask about the soul unconditionally, what is the truth about its nature, the inquiry is metaphysical. But if, on the other hand, you confine yourself to a limited kind of question about the soul, that limitation keeps you within Empirical psychology, and is the boundary of your science. And this in principle seems as clear as it is evident and visible in practice. It is evident in practice, I will venture to say, to any one not biassed by theory that both practical and theoretical knowledge of the human soul is in fact actually possessed and used by those who are not metaphysicians. And an objection which would disprove the existence and possibility of this fact can hardly be well founded. (vii.) I will consider next a further objection, which pos- sibly may be raised, in order in my reply to it to define my position more clearly. "We admit," it may be said, "your contention as to the object and scope of psychology. Its object, we agree, is to study the mere course of psychical events as such. It has to observe facts and to classify them, and then to seek to explain them to explain, that is, not their ultimate nature, but their origin, and the course which they take. It has to find, so far as is possible, the reason why they happen as they happen, and not the truth as to what tbey are. It seeks to discover the reason why we find this one rather than that one, and it does not study the real nature of all or of any, but only their nature so far as they 3