The physicist can say: There is this or that, a, b, c, or d. The psychologist, unless he will abolish altogether that which is characteristic of psychology, must say: He has such and such presentations, feels so, acts so. There is a second methodological objection to presentationism. It identifies psychology and physics where they differ in standpoint: it treats them differently where they are alike. The presentationist "allows the meaning to hold in objective knowledge, but ignores everything but the etymology in subjective knowledge." – Dr. Münsterberg's psychology (typical presentationism) furnishes us with instances of these two errors. Modern psychology correlates psychosis with neurosis, and will resolve feeling and activity into sensations. But for feeling, at least, the evidence is dead against this resolution: apart from the fact that teleology is opposed to it. Much the same holds of activity. In a machine we distinguish mechanical arrangement from motive power and efficiency. Presentationism is adequate to nine-tenths, perhaps, of each psychological fact. It might be made a special branch of psychology. But we can neither take the fraction for the whole, nor reduce the tenth. The problem of subjective knowledge, which is unique in character, remains. "I am disposed to maintain that the Ego is both an unknown and an unknowable for sense: the non-Ego partly an unknown, but not an unknowable, so far as the possibilities of sensational rapport are unlimited."
E. B. T.
In our desire to know ourselves we work at first by Introspection purely, and if at a later stage we find other means of extending and improving our knowledge, Introspection is still our main resort, it is alone supreme, everything else subsidiary. Its compass is ten times all the other methods put together and fifty times the utmost range of psycho-physics alone. Beginning with the grand metaphysical issue – thought and reality, knowing and being – its exclusive dependence on introspective method speaks much for the ascendant position of that method in our inquiries, when we consider the enormous significance so long attached to this great issue. The question of Origins cannot be dealt with by one single method, but where Introspection fails, the other methods cannot be said to make
