image of it. The psychologist solves such problems by declaring all the objects of which we are immediately conscious to be mere representatives of what is without, but maintains that the representatives obtained through the sense-organs, under certain normal conditions, give truer information regarding the world beyond than those gained under other conditions. It is of course incumbent upon him to support this position by evidence, and evidence of a kind he can undoubtedly furnish.

But there is still another way in which the psychologist's view of the mind differs, or ought to differ, from that of the unscientific. The latter has gotten so far as to recognize the existence of ideas, of conscious states, and to distinguish them from external objects, as we have seen. But he believes vaguely in the existence of a self, which is distinct from any or all of its conscious states, which in some sense underlies them, or has them, and which is the agent in knowing, feeling, and willing. How this self or "I" knows or acts, he does not pretend to say; even what it is, he cannot make intelligible to himself or to others; but he believes that it is, and that it should not be confounded with the things which it knows or upon which it exercises its activity. There is, of course, some danger of injustice in attributing to a man beliefs which have never emerged in his mind to any degree of clearness and definiteness, but it seems safe to say that the plain man believes, vaguely and indefinitely, in the sort of a self indicated above. thinks that he is conscious of something of the kind, and the language which we have all inherited and daily employ is well adapted to foster such a belief. We say: "I think," "I feel," "I will," and the "I" in our thought vaguely stands for a something different from all mental states whatever. It is a something big with mystery and possible misconception.

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To the psychologist, however, a mind is, or should be, nothing more than a transcript of the external world supplemented by certain conscious states not supposed to have their prototypes without, feelings of pleasure, pain, etc. If we use the word "idea” to cover broadly all those things, which, according to the less scientific view, the mind "has," we may say that the psychologist should regard the mind as wholly composed of ideas, and should regard his task as accomplished when he has satisfactorily analyzed and arranged these. A mind is, of course, a very complex little world, and the phenomena it presents are by no means easy to

analyze and classify. Some things in it seem to stand out clearly; some remain, after our best efforts, dim and vague. It is quite conceivable that certain things, commonly supposed to have their being in such a world, should turn out, upon investigation, to be mere chimeras. It is not difficult, in the obscurity which still covers much of our mental life, to confound one thing with another,; to create a phantasm, or to seek diligently for the solution of a problem which should never have been proposed for solution. These truths the psychologist should acknowledge; and the difficulties of his task should not lead him to jump to unintelligible or merely tautological explanations of obscure mental phenomena, nor despair of analyzing into its elements what has heretofore resisted his efforts at analysis. He need not deny the consciousness of self experienced by the plain man and the psychologist alike; but he may legitimately expect to find it, when subjected to careful examination, a mental state, not wholly different from other mental states, and containing nothing hopelessly mysterious. He simply abandons his task when he introduces obscure metaphysical notions to piece out his incomplete psychological knowledge; and in so far as he does this, he must renounce the claim to be, in any just sense of the word, a man of science.

I have said that the psychologist does, or should, regard minds as consisting wholly of conscious states, and it has been necessary to speak thus guardedly because there are still not a few psychologists who cling to an older and a less scientific way of regarding the mind. But the scope and methods of the science of psychology are coming to be more and more definitely limited; and to my mind, at least, there is little doubt that the psychologist of the future will regard it as a work of supererogation to enter upon the discussion of the nature or functions of any self, or ego, or "knower" which cannot be resolved into a complex of mental elements. That the current is running in this direction appears to be abundantly evident. As I purpose somewhat later to revert to this topic, and give definite reasons why the psychologist should abandon the older view, I shall say no more upon the subject at present.

From the foregoing, it is plain that the differences between the knowledge of minds common to all intelligent persons and that peculiar to the student of psychology, are sufficiently important. But it is also clear that a recourse to psychology

will not solve all the problems which arise out of the experience of things which we all possess. The psychologist describes the development of a consciousness, and endeavors to give an accurate account of its contents; but he assumes, as does every student of natural science, the existence of a world of material things in relation to our mental states. He may tell us how we come to build up a mental image of a system of extended things, but he is no more bound to tell us what is the ultimate nature of space than is the physicist. He pictures the development of a consciousness in time, and he tries to explain how we come to form the notion of time, but we have no right to ask him what time is, or whether it is in itself subjective or objective. His work touches much more closely, it is true, such problems as these, than does the work of the physicist; we feel impelled to ask him his opinion upon such points at many stages of his progress. But he has a right to refuse us an answer, on the ground that he is prosecuting studies in a natural science, that his science rests, like others, upon assumptions which may be further analyzed, but that it is more convenient to refer the carrying out of such analyses to a special discipline, which is similarly related to many sciences. As a psychologist, he is justified in putting such things aside, and in remaining upon the plane of the common understanding, the plane of natural science.

There is, of course, much that is vague in the thinking of the man who rests wholly on the plane of natural science. The physicist may have no very clear notion of all that he means by matter and energy, and yet he may be a good physicist. He may experiment with ingenuity, and observe and record phenomena with accuracy. And the psychologist may have the vaguest of notions as to the whole connotation of the word "mind," or of the phrase "a material world," and yet he may be a good psychologist and materially add to our knowledge of minds. If he has not carried on with some measure of success the sort of reflective thinking demanded in metaphysics, he will probably mix from time to time with his psychology more or less crude material that is not strictly psychological. But this is on his part a work of supererogation. He has the right, as has the physicist, to work in his own field, and to make use of some concepts which he has not completely analyzed.

CHAPTER II

THE INADEQUACY OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT

It is easily apparent that the position taken by the plain man and by the psychologist touching the relation of minds to an external world calls for further criticism, and cannot be regarded as final except within the field of psychology. It is, indeed, a convenient fiction, and must not be accepted as though it were a literal statement of the truth. Upon examination it turns out, when taken literally, to be flatly self-contradictory, and thus to annihilate itself. And since this position is natural to all men, so long as their thinking remains upon the plane of the common understanding, and the need of subjecting it to further criticism is evident only to the few who have made some progress in reflective thought, it is well worth while to spend a little time in the examination of the psychological standpoint, and to make the above-mentioned contradiction stand out with distinctness.

We have seen that this view of the mind and the world assumes that each mind has only its representative images of things, and cannot directly attain to the things themselves. When it asks how a given mind comes to have a knowledge of an external thing, it concerns itself with the messages that have been conveyed to the mind by means of the bodily senses - with the materials, so to speak, out of which the image has been built up. It describes in detail the process of building up such an image, and distinguishing sharply between the image and the corresponding thing, it maintains that the mind knows only so much about the thing as is contained in this image and in other images obtained in a similar way. It admits that, given an image in the absence of the thing (an hallucination), the mind will have absolutely no way of knowing the thing to be absent except by referring to its other experiences and assuming this one, as abnormal, to be a false representative, and without a corresponding reality behind it. In other words, it shuts the mind up

to its own circle of consciousness, and makes the external world present to it only by proxy. The outer world, as the mind immediately knows it, is a complex mental experience, built up out of mental elements, and not the real outer world at all. Thus the very idea "outer" is, to the mind possessing it, only a something in consciousness-an inner representative of genuine externality. It is not a real "outer," but merely its image.

Let us try by the aid of an illustration to get a clear notion of this view of the mind. Let us imagine a man imprisoned in a doorless and windowless cell, whose heavy walls shut out every aspect of the luminous and resonant world without. He has always been thus a prisoner, in solitude and darkness, and in a silence broken only by the click of the telegraphic key which is the sole avenue by which messages may arrive from the unknown beyond the walls which encompass him. He can grope his way about his cell, and has, hence, some experience of space and of things in space. He can make sounds which he can himself hear. And he has, in addition, the series of sounds mentioned as produced independently of him, and constituting messages from another world. To such elements is his experience limited.

What sort of a world can he build up out of such experiences, and how must he proceed in its construction? It is evident that he is not in the position of one who has thus been imprisoned after having enjoyed an extended experience of things as they appear to those who walk abroad. He is not possessed of the secret which makes a message at once recognizable as a message, and turns a series of meaningless sounds into a wealth of information regarding, not sounds merely, but also a variety of other things which bear little resemblance to them. It requires a certain amount of information to be able to recognize that a given experience is a representative of something beyond itself; a message does not announce itself as such under all circumstances; and one may gaze long upon the cross-section of a bit of cord without being able to guess, from that single experience taken by itself, what manner of thing it is to which this little plane surface belongs, or, indeed, whether it belongs to anything at all. One cannot have the least idea that a succession of sounds is a message, and has come from without, so long as one knows absolutely nothing about it save that it is found within. The Prisoners in the Den, which Plato has