Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/42

28 P. H. BRADLEY: The presumption in favour of that limitation seems to me, I confess, to be so overwhelming that my best course will be simply to try to defend the doctrine of phenomenalism against objections and misconceptions. Butlet me first attempt to state its nature more accurately. 1 /Psychology is Kb be concerned with psychical events, and such an event is ^whatever is immediately experienced, either as a whole or as an integral aspect of a whole, and is not for the purpose in hand taken otherwise than as an adjective happening to and qualifying a particular soul. These facts are events because they happen in time, each with a place in the order of the " real world " in general, and of this one soul in particular. On the other hand by their " happening " is not meant that they have no duration, for, to be events at all, they certainly must have some duration. But further psychology is not con- fined merely to these several events and aspects of events, and it has also to study them in their relations of sequence and co-existence within one soul. These relations, so far as they fall outside immediate experience, are of course themselves not events in the sense of facts immediately experienced, and again their laws are not events at all. But the scope of these laws on the other hand is strictly limited, and they are and remain mere laws of the bare co-existence and sequence of events. With regard to the meaning of one soul or sub- Jject that, so far I see, must be fixed arbitrarily In the psychology of man and of the higher animals I myself think it would be most convenient to fix it by the identity of the organism, and to treat a plurality of souls within that if indeed a plurality ever really happens as the adjectives of one soul. The mere course of psychical events, as such, happening within a single organism and the laws of co- existence and sequence between these events will then be the object of psychology. And within psychology no further question, and in especial no question about ultimate truth, is to be entertained. I will at once endeavour to explain this further by de- fending it briefly against a series of objections. I will not try to take these in a systematic order or to keep them wholly distinct, and I shall for the most part state them in niy own way. more clearly. But if Dr. Stout does not hold them, what alternative does he offer ? To me it remains unintelligible, and I must therefore persist in repeating that there is no alternative between accepting the view which I advocate and having in principle no boundary at all between psychology and metaphysics. 1 Cy. here MIND, xii., 855-56.