"Psychoses" has been proposed by Mr. Huxley. But Professor James would substitute for the ordinary term the less "cumbrous" expressions, "feeling or thought" (I, p. 185, f.). This use of language is, indeed, somewhat of a return to the nomenclature of the seventeenth century (to Descartes with his cogito as the equivalent of all truly mental phenomena). It has, moreover, the disadvantage of compelling the author himself constantly to vacillate between the more general and the more particular meanings of the words. We might even suspect that it is one cause of the extraordinary way in which the unity of each "thought" (that is, "field of consciousness," no matter how highly elaborate and complex) is insisted upon, to the prejudice and neglect of careful analysis of the many elements, or factors, that may enter into the constitution of that "thought."
Still, it is not difficult to understand this delimitation, by "first intention," of the field of psychological science. Its phenomena are the states of consciousness (or "thoughts") of the individual, as such; — that is, as states of consciousness. The science is to be both descriptive and explanatory; for it is both "of the phenomena, and of their conditions."
Further examination, however, of the author's conception of psychology as a natural science results in a most astonishing abbreviation of the rights of the psychologist. The treatment is to be explanatory, as a matter of course; it is to discover and reduce to order the conditions of the phenomena of mental life; otherwise, it would not be science. For Professor James holds, as we all do, that the "old psychology" was relatively lacking in scientific quality. It described and classified; but it did not explain, by pointing out, and reducing to general terms, the concomitant and antecedent conditions of the phenomena. How greatly disappointed we are, therefore, when an advocate of the new "natural science" of psychology restricts all legitimate explanation, by his very conception of such science, to one class of conditions only, — and these by far the most obscure and unattainable of all.
In his Preface, and in several other places, Professor James makes a gallant attempt to defend psychology as a purely natural
