G. F. STOUT, Analytic Psychology. 391 has observed rightly the nature of the mental activity said to be present in immediate experience. I regret the somewhat recondite nature of the foregoing refer- ence to the general logic of the causal conception. While I have developed this conception more or less independently in certain previous papers of my own on the general problems of knowledge, the conception of psychical causation here concerned has close relations to some of the analyses of Avenarius ; and I may refer to the latter's observations on the nature of psychological experience as, at least, helping to make my own notions, even in this rough statement, somewhat intelligible, despite the differences between the two theories of causation. And the prominence given by Mr. Stout to his own conception of mental activity, and to its logic, must be my warrant for referring at such length to first principles as I criticise his views. For Mr. Stout makes the experience of mental activity, and of its various hindrances, the source of the most essential features of feeling, of belief, of cona- tion, and, in a large measure, of knowledge. If my criticism is well founded all the essentially "dynamical" aspects of his theory must be seriously modified, as a brief consideration will still further show. For if I am right, psychological laws of a causal nature are, like the causal laws of physics, all of them the objects of a certain highly indirect and "conceptual" type of experience, the experi- ence of "the psychologists" or of the "students of human nature," viewed as the observers to whom are present the essen- tially " common " facts of their world of scientific knowledge. And these common facts which the psychologists are conceived as knowing, are not the mere sequences of mental states in any one observer's immediate field of introspective knowledge, but the uniformities of the psycho-physical realm called, in general, the " realm of human nature ". My proof, so far as the present case goes, may lie in the fact that Mr. Stout, like any other psy- chologist, devotes himself, almost altogether, in concrete cases of psychological induction, to reporting and to commenting upon just such common facts ; and he uses introspection, for the most part, only to illustrate here and there what is viewed by him as commonly observable. Whenever he announces any definite laws, apart from the general existence of " mental activity " itself, he appeals to language, to pathology, to childhood, to mankind in general, as furnishing the proofs for his inductions ; and he feels sure of these latter because he gets such social verification. But now what I further assert is that any thus socially verified psychologi- cal law is, ipso facto, never a law about merely mental facts, but always a law about psycho-physical processes. To state it as a purely mental law is to state it in a false abstraction. And this is true, not merely because the mental processes contain " gaps," or are inwardly "incomplete," but still more because social verifica- tion, as such, faces series of psycho-physical facts. State com-
