Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/494

ILLUSORY PSYCHOLOGY. 493 states of consciousness as peculiar to ourselves, the con- nexion between them and their conditions being the thing sought. In metaphysic, though we cannot unbind ourselves from the fad that our consciousness is individually condi- tioned, yet we can abstract from it so as to avoid making it the object of inquiry. But we cannot abstract from it in psychology, for the plain reason that it is the special fact which psychology has to study. Of course I do not for a moment deny that psychology is of the utmost service to metaphysic, and exercises a most important and even neces- sary control over its analyses, for which reason the two should never be sundered, and certainly not in the interests of metaphysic, supposing always that psychology is properly constituted on the basis above described. And the same may be said of all the positive sciences in varying degrees. Metaphysic is at once their basis, and its content their generalised counterpart or subjective aspect, which must be harmonised with, and partly by means of, their results. Nevertheless the logical principia of psychology and meta- physic are different, as well as their purposes and methods. They are not distinguished by one being the science of the individual soul, the other of the universal soul, but by one being the science of the real conditions of consciousness wherever found, the other the analysis and classification of its content. But it is time to bring this paper to a close by asking the final question, What does Mr. Dewey mean by method ? If psychology is the method of philosophy, what is the method of psychology ? A method we naturally expect to be some principle or rule which guides our procedure in investigating. What, if any, are the principles or rules proposed by Mr. Dewey as special to psychology '? There are literally none. There are plenty of passages which speak of what psychology is to do, but very few of how it is to do it. One remarkable passage indeed there is, in which it is said that " Psychology is the completed method of philosophy, because in it science and philosophy, fact and reason, are one" (p. 165). But if psychology is only the completed method of philosophy, it looks as if the method while at. work, and before completion, belonged rather to philosophy than to science. The passage which comes nearest to a description of the method of psychology is the following : " But the very essence of psychology as method is that it treats of ex- perience in its absolute totality, not setting up some one aspect of it to account for the whole, as, for example, our physical evolutionists do, nor yet attempting to determine its nature from something outside and beyond itself, as, for example, our so-called empirical psychologists have done (p. 168).