Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/401

 G. F. STOUT, Analytic Psychology. 385 is called to the laws of apperception, as illustrated by the processes of language (and this is what is frequently done in the second volume of our author's work), the author cannot say that the laws as then stated are the results of anybody's introspection. For language, as such, is an externally observable and physical record of how minds in general work. Its processes (for instance the processes indicated by its grammatical form) may be interpreted by the individual by the aid of his own introspection. But the interest of these processes, as indicating psychological laws, depends upon the assumption that the processes of language do record, not how my mind in particular just now works, but how the minds of people in general have worked. If the law that one announces thus depends for its discovery upon an interpretation of certain socially significant doings of other people, the psychologist is in so far using, not his supposed primary method of introspection, but the methods above declared to be secondary, namely, those methods of social interpretation of the expressions of other people's minds to which we are all accustomed. In reading our author's later chapters, we are, therefore, constantly disposed to note that the laws which he announces as laws of mental life, whether true or not, are not laws which he has detected merely by intro- spection, nor laws which any one of us can verify solely by his introspection. One is thus led to inquire whether our author, or any other psychologist, is ever able to say in purely introspective terms: "I have observed for myself, individually, without refer- ence to other minds, that there is occurring in me a process subject to the law that something, a state or series of states A, is always, or even very generally, followed by a state or series of states B ". Very frequently, as one can see, the practical logic of the psycholo- gist, whether he be our author or anybody else, really runs thus : "Various expressions of various people, as, for instance, the expressions that are crystallised in our language, prove that, on the whole, states of the kind A tend to be followed by the states of the kind B in a way such as to indicate a more or less exact and uni- form law of sequence, although if any one of us were left to his own momentary introspection, and to his memory merely, he could not be sure of enough cases of such a sequence to be warranted, by the tests of inductive logic, in affirming any general law, even for himself, or for his own mind ". Every man knows, of course, introspectively, a great deal about the mere routine of his own customary trains of consciousness. But such routine is so far like the arrangement of the inside of one's own house. When one knows one's own house, one can scarcely say that one has thereby learned " laws of physics". Just so when one knows, in a common-sense way, the mere routine of one's own private trains of conscious states, one has not yet learned " laws of mind ". And the question is whether, by mere looking within, the psychologist ever learns true laws, even of his own mind. For introspection is subject to the peculiar defect that its facts are momentary. " Re- 25