from the known to the unknown, then Analytic Psychology, starting from human experience should precede any attempt to treat of the genesis of experience as a whole, or to correlate psychology with physiology. And when psychology is regarded not simply as ancillary to philosophy or theology, but is studied throughout with scientific impartiality, there are happily facts in plenty within the range of human experience, though long overlooked as trivial or unimportant, which throw far more light on, say the problem of instinct, than biology alone could ever bring to bear. But in truth there is no question of a choice of methods: in every case physiological and comparative psychology must fall back on the facts and analogies of our own experience.

The standpoint of Psychology as individualistic.

§ 7. We conclude then that psychology cannot be defined by reference to a special subject-matter as such concrete sciences, for example, as mineralogy and botany can be; and yet, since it deals in some sort with the whole of experience, it is obviously not an abstract science in any ordinary sense of that term. To be characterized at all, it must be characterized by the standpoint from which this experience is viewed. This standpoint is sometimes termed 'individualistic,' that of the so-called objectsciences being distinguished as 'universalistic.' But both alike are to be regarded as 'objective' in the sense of being true for all-consisting of what Kant would call judgments of experience. For psychology is not biography in any sense, least of all biography as dealing with idiosyncrasies, and in an idiom having an interest and a meaning for one subject only, and incommunicable to any other. Locke, Berkeley and Hume have been justly censured because they regarded the critical investigation of knowledge as a psychological problem, and set to work to study the individual mind simply for the sake of this problem. But none the less their standpoint was the proper one for the science of psychology itself; and, however surely their philosophy was foredoomed to failure, there is no denying a steady psychological advance as we pass from Locke to Hume and his modern representatives. By 'idea' Locke tells us he means "whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks" (ie. is conscious). But shut in within such a circle of ideas he found

himself powerless to explain his knowledge of a world assumed to lie beyond it and to be independent of it. Though he was able to give a very good account of some of those ideas themselves, he could not justify his belief in the universal world of things whence, as he supposed, certain of them 'were conveyed'; any more than Robinson Crusoe could have explored the continents whose existence he inferred from the strange products that were drifted to his island, though he might perhaps survey the island itself well enough. Berkeley accordingly, as Professor Fraser happily puts it, abolished Locke's hypothetical outer circle. Thereby he made the psychological standpoint clearer than ever -hence the truth of Hume's remark, that Berkeley's arguments "admit of no answer"; at the same time the epistemological problem was as hopeless as before-hence again the truth of Hume's remark that those arguments "produced no conviction." Of all the facts with which he deals, the psychologist may truly say that their esse is percipi, in so far as such facts are facts of presentation, are ideas in Locke's sense, or objects which imply a subject. Before we became conscious there was no world for us; should our consciousness cease, the world for us ceases too; had we been born blind, the world would for us have had no colour; if deaf, it would have had no sounds; if idiotic, it would have had no meaning. Psychology, then, never transcends the limits of the individual.

But now, though this Berkeleyan standpoint is its standpoint, psychology in the first place is not pledged to the method employed by Berkeley and by Locke; and in the second place must repudiate altogether the Cartesian confusion of presentations with subjective modifications in which they shared. Psychology may be individualistic without being confined exclusively to the introspective method. There is nothing to hinder the psychologist from employing materials furnished by his observations of other men, of infants, of the lower animals, or of the insane; nothing to hinder him taking counsel with the philologist or even the physiologist, provided always he can show the psychological bearings of those facts which are not directly psychological. But by whatever methods, from whatever sources its facts are ascertained, they must-to have a psychological import-be regarded as having a place in, or as being a constituent of, someone's experience. In this sense, i.e. as presented

to an individual, 'the whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth' may belong to psychology, but otherwise they are beyond its scope.

Psychology then we define as the science of individual experience-understanding by experience not merely, not primarily, cognition, but also, and above all, conative activity or behaviour.

CHAPTER II

GENERAL ANALYSIS

Psychology and Epistemology.

§ I. We have just seen that in seeking to make a first general analysis of experience, we must start from individual human experience; for it is this alone that we immediately know. From this standpoint we have now to endeavour to determine the 'irreducible minimum' which all experience involves; in other words, to reach a concept applicable to every other form of experience as well as to our own. Etymologically experience connotes practical acquaintance, efficiency and skill as the result of trial-usually repeated trial-and effort. Many recent writers on comparative psychology propose to make evidence of experience in this sense the criterion of psychical life. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib, and so would pass muster; but the ant and the bee, since they are said to learn nothing, would, in spite of their marvellous instinctive skill, be regarded as mere automata in Descartes's sense. That this criterion is decisive on the positive side will hardly be denied; the question how far it is available negatively we must examine later on. Experience is the process of becoming expert by experiment, let us say meanwhile. It will be well next briefly to note some of the implications of this positive criterion. The chief implication, no doubt, is that which in psychological language we express as the duality of subject and object-already strenuously insisted on in the preceding chapter. Looking at this relation as the comparative psychologist has to do, we find that it tallies in the main with the biological relation of organism and environment. The individuality of the organism corresponds to, though it is not identical with, that of the psychological subject; while to the

environment and its changes corresponds the continuously changing objective continuum or totum objectivum, as we shall call it, though again the two are not identical. This double correspondence helps us to see still more clearly the error of regarding individual experience as wholly subjective, and at the same time helps us to find some measure of truth in the naïve realism of Common Sense. As these points have an important bearing on the connexion of psychology and epistemology, we must attempt to elucidate them more fully.

Though it would be unwarrantable to resolve a thing, as some have done, into a mere meeting-point of relations, yet it is perhaps as great a mistake to assume that it can be anything determinate in itself apart altogether from relations to other things. By the physicist this mistake can hardly be made: for him action and reaction are strictly correlative: a material system can do no work on itself. For the biologist, again, organism and environment are invariably complementary. But in psychology, when presentations are regarded as subjective modifications, we have this mistaken isolation in a glaring form, and all the hopeless difficulties of what is called 'subjective idealism' are the result. Subjective modifications no doubt are always one constituent of individual experience, but always as correlative directly or remotely-to objective modifications or changes-present or prospective-in the objective continuum. If experience were throughout subjective, not merely would the term 'subjective' itself be meaningless, not merely would the conception of the objective never arise, but the entirely impersonal and intransitive process that remained, though it might be described as 'absolute becoming1,' could not be called even solipsism, least of all real experience. Wherever experience is inferred, Common Sense, then, is right in positing a real agent answering to what we know as Self and interacting with another reality answering to what each of us knows as the World. It is further right in regarding the world which each of us immediately knows as a coloured, sounding, tangible world-more exactly as a world of sensible qualities. The assumption of naïve realism, that the world which each one knows, exists as he knows it, independently of him, is questionable, to say the least. But this assumption goes beyond

1 Cf. Herbart, Einleitung in die Philosophie, Hartenstein's ed., 1850, § 129.