Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/406

 390 CRITICAL NOTICES: attending, that is, express, in what Avenarius calls their Aussagen, that they " do attend," then there uniformly follow certain other observable phenomena, which may be described as reports or ex- pressions of "clearer and clearer comprehension," or of " improv- ing acquaintance with objects," or of " better adjustment to the environment," according as the attention has appeared to be long continued or minute. Now one who asserts this inductively verifi- able law, asserts the efficaciousness of attention in the only sense in which such efficaciousness can become a principle in psycho- logical science. What ultimate epistemological warrant anybody can have for such inductions belongs elsewhere for consideration. It is enough here that the assertions of all inductive psychologists, including our author, in so far as they are assertions of general principles about attention, or about any other "active process," are just such inductive assertions about human nature in general, about the behaviour of mankind, viewed as a universally legible psycho-physical expression of mental states. But all such asser- tions are indeed "indirect". Nobody's immediate introspection can give them any direct logical warrant. They stand or fall with the validity of the social consciousness, and of the general process of induction. The causal connexion that they assert is, as it stands, not a connexion observable within the field of introspection, but a connexion between one psycho-physical total and another. View- ing human nature in such wise that certain expressions, reports, gestures, words, or other manifestations, are regarded as insepar- able from certain more or less definitely legible mental states, whose presence is assumed to be well known, and whose interpre- tation is assumed to be upon general social grounds valid for all psychologists, the psychologist inductively makes out that the psycho-physical complex A (an enormously complicated total of physical activities, of nervous conditions of these activities, and of accompanying psychical states) is connected, according to defin- able principles, with another psycho-physical complex, B. And thus, and thus alone, can an empirical psychologist define in uni- versal terms, causal connexions. Now connexions thus defined cannot be identical in contents with connexions immediately ob- servable by the introspective student of the conscious stream. It is useless to try to discover the causal laws in immediate experience, when the laws, just as soon as they become laws, refer to what is not and cannot be immediate, namely to the conceived objects of a universally valid scientific experience of complex psycho-physical uniformities. On the other hand, in so far as such uniformities are discovered, they cannot verify what immedi- ate experience discovers, because they refer to different objects from those present in immediate experience. In brief, then, in so far as mental activity is an object of direct introspection, it has nothing to do with the causal laws of mind. And, on the other hand, in so far as causal laws are discovered by the psychologist as universal principles, they cannot be used as proving that one