of the human mind profess to follow the analogy of the natural sciences? It does. Then it must conform itself to the conditions upon which they depend. Now, the primary condition upon which the natural sciences depend and proceed, is the distinction between a subject and an object; or, in other words, between a Being enquiring, and a Being enquired into. Without such a discrimination they could not move a step. Very well: man in studying himself follows the same method. He divides himself into subject and object. There is himself, the subject enquiring, and there is "the human mind," the object enquired into. There is here, then, at the outset, distinctly two. The principal condition of the enquiry demands that there shall be two. We will suppose then the science of the "object enquired into" to be complete. And now we turn to the man, and say, "Give us a science of the subject enquiring." He answers that he has already done so—that, in this case, the subject and object are identical—and in saying this is it not plain that he violates the very condition upon which his science professed to proceed and to depend—namely, the distinction between subject and object? He now gives up this distinction. He confounds the two together. He makes one of them: and the total confusion and obliteration of his science is the consequence. Does he again recur to the distinction? then we keep probing him with one or other horn of our dilemma, which we will thus express for the behoof of the "philosophers of mind." Do you, in your science of man, profess to lay down and to found upon the distinction between the subject (yourselves) and the object (the human mind), or do you not? If you do, then we affirm that while studying the object you necessarily keep back in the subject the most important fact connected with man, namely, the fact of consciousness; and that you cannot place this fact in the object of your research without doing away the distinction upon which you founded. But if you do away this distinction, you renounce and disregard the vital and indispensable condition upon which physical science depends: and what, then, becomes of your science as a research conducted, as you profess it to be, upon the principles of physical investigation? You may, indeed, still endeavour to accommodate your research to the spirit of physical enquiry by talking of a subject-object; but this is a wretched subterfuge, and the word you here make use of must ever carry a contradiction upon its very front. You talk of what is just as inconceivable to physical science as a square circle or a circular square. By "subject," physical science understands that which is not an "object," but something opposed to an object, and by "object," that which is not a "subject," but something opposed to a subject: and can form no conception of these two as identical. But by "subject-object" you mean a subject which becomes an object—i.e., its own object. But this is inconceivable, or, at any rate, is only conceivable on this ground, that the subject keeps back in itself, itself and the consciousness of what is passing in the object; because if it invests itself, and the fact of consciousness in the object, the object from that moment ceases to be an object, and becomes reconverted into a subject, that is, into one's self without an object. This, at least, is quite plain: that in talking of a subject-object, you abandon the essential distinction upon which the physical sciences found: and the ruin of your science as a physical research (that is, as a legitimate research in the only sense in which you have declared a research can be legitimate) is the result.
The difficulties, then, in the way of the establishment of a science of "the human mind," are insuperable. Its weakness and futility are of a twofold character. It starts with an hypothesis, and yet cannot maintain this hypothesis, or remain consistent with it for a single moment. Man makes a hypothetical object of himself, and calls this "the human mind;" and then, in order to invest it with a certain essential phenomenon, he is compelled every instant to unmake it as an object, and to convert back again into a subject that is into himself—a confusion of the most perplexing kind—a confusion which, so long as it is persisted in, must render everything like a science of man altogether hopeless. Such being the state of things, it is indeed no wonder that despair should have settled down upon the present condition, the prospect, and the retrospect of psychological research.
In the second place, let us say one
