Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/200

186 and Mr. McDougall, on the nature of psychological method and the nature of conscious processes. While it is, indeed, becoming every day clearer and clearer that no single man can write a book upon psychology in general, it is becoming more and more imperative for all psychologists to arrive at some common agreement regarding the nature of mental or conscious process, so that the public may understand what is meant by psychology as the study of psychical or mental processes. In this last important book upon psychology we have the most definite confirmation of the idea that there can be, in the words of Mr. W. R. McDougall, no complete science of conscious processes as such, or rather (and more definitely) of the idea that conscious processes cannot be understood apart from the idea of function or genetic development. What I mean is that the time has come for both philosophers and psychologists to do all they can, by their definitions of consciousness and mental process, to disabuse the mind of the average man of the idea that we human beings possess consciousness for any other reason than the one reason that we may do something with this consciousness. Mr. Dewey complains that, when we read Mr. Baldwin's book, we are always reading about a "projective," or a "subjective," or an "ejective" self, and never about any one personal self in the proper sense of the word; always, as it were, about a shifting and never about a stable self. Now, again, this touches the main point of Mr. Baldwin's investigation. There is no self that is not an effort to accomplish something, to eject the "within" outward, or to subjectivize what is apparently without; and there is no consciousness or conscious intelligence that is not an effort to "understand a complex situation," and to guide the action of the individual out of such a situation. Mr. Dewey is only too true to fact in saying that it is not always clear what Mr. Baldwin means by the projective self, and that this perplexes the reader, but there can be no misapprehension of Mr. Baldwin's main contention that there is nothing stationary or stable about the self but the process of its growth in a social environment and its imperative duty of affecting that