Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/217

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 197 object is present to the thought that thinks it by a coun- terfeit image of itself, or directly and without any interven- ing image at all ; the question of nominalism and concep- tualism, of the shape in which things are present when only a general notion of them is before the mind ; are compara- tively easy questions when once the psychologist's fallacy is eliminated from their treatment, — as we shall ere long see (in Chapter XII). Another variety of the psychologisf fallacy is the as- sumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of it- self as the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state is aware of itself only from within ; it grasps what we call its own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the contrary, is aware of it from without, and knows its relations with all sorts of other things. What the thought sees is only its own object; what the psychologist sees is the thought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all the rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's point of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we know the consciousness is, for what it is a consciousness of, and counting its outward, and so to speak physical, relations with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which we set it down as aware. Crude as such a confusion of standpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is never- theless a snare into which no psychologist has kept himself at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire stock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watch- ful against its subtly corrupting influence. Summary. To sum up the chaj)ter, Psychology assumes that thoughts successively occur, and that they know objects in a world which the psychologist also knows. These thoughts are the subjective data of ivhich he treats, and their relations to their objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the world constitute the subject-matter of psychologic science.- Its methods are introspection, experimentation, and comparison. But intro- sj)ection is no sure guide to truths about our mental states ; and in particular the poverty of the psychological vocabu.