determination on the part of the philosophers to keep such questions out of psychology and treat them only in their widest possible connections, amongst the objects of an ultimate critical review of all the elements of the world.
Professor Andrew Seth has put the thing excellently in his late inaugural address at Edinburgh, on the Present Position of the Philosophical Sciences.[1]
"Psychology," he says, "has become more scientific, and has thereby become more conscious of her own aims, and at the same time, of her necessary limitations. Ceasing to put herself forward as philosophy, she has entered upon a new period of development as science; and, in doing so, she has disarmed the jealousy, and is even fast conquering the indifference, of the transcendental philosopher." Why should not Professor Ladd, why should not any 'transcendental philosopher,' be glad to help confirm and develop so beneficial a tendency as this? In Professor Ladd's own book on Physiological Psychology, that "real being, proceeding to unfold powers that are sui generis, according to laws of its own," for whose recognition he contends, plays no organic part in the work,[2] and has proved a mere stumbling-block to his biological reviewers. Why force it on their attention, and perpetuate thereby a sort of wrangle from which physics and chemistry have long since emerged, and from which psychology, if left to the 'facts of experience' alone, promises so soon to escape?
Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. Whatever conclusions an ultimate criticism may come to about mental states, they form a practically
- ↑ Blackwood, 1891.
- ↑ I mean that such a being is quite barren of particular consequences. Its character is only known by its reactions on the signals which the nervous system gives, and these must be gathered by observation after the fact. If only it were subject to successive reincarnations, as the theosophists say it is, so that we might guess what sort of a body it would unite with next, or what sort of persons it had helped to constitute previously, those would be great points gained. But even those gains are denied us; and the real being is, for practical purposes, an entire superfluity, which a practical psychology can perfectly well do without.
