Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/368

 ASSOCIATION AND THOUGHT. 355 The word Association has been used to express my agreement with the English school at its best. With it I am convinced that thought proper is a product, and that, starting from what is presented, and keeping wholly to that field and to the laws of its movements, our science can trace thought's probable generation. And if at any point we fail, then that point must be marked as ' at present unknown '. Nothing can warrant our importation of a faculty or faculties, or a subject and its functions, or an activity, or an energy, if we mean by these more than some law of phenomena, some way of happening among psychical events. Our sole remedy is to reconsider our data and their laws, and to refuse to bring shame upon our honest nakedness by scraps of physiology and rags of metaphysics. It is to mark my entire adhesion to this principle that I have used " Associa- diately experienced either by the soul or by the observing psychologist ? We see here the impotence of empirical science to justify its principles theoretically. We have to amend our definition of fact ; and yet, if amended, it threatens to let in metaphysics. But we meet this practically by the proviso that the above relations are not facts, save and except so far as they exist between facts as previously defined. That, I hope, answers the purpose ; and the definition will run : " A psychical fact is anything which is immediately experienced and has duration, quality, intensity ; or is any one of these aspects, as a mere distinguishable aspect, so far, that is, as one aspect is taken as belonging to something which possesses the other aspects also ; or, again, is any relation existing between any facts as previously defined ". If we leave individual states and go on to the general, and ask if laws are facts, that is, to some extent, I presume, a matter of taste. I should say that, to speak properly, they are not so, though it may be convenient to call them so. The laws, of course, are confined to the region of facts. It must be, of course, understood that our science does not disregard other aspects of psychical states, e.g., logical or ethical. But it looks at them merely with a view to deal with them as appearing in and as influen- cing the course of psychical events. And a reply to the objection that " an unanalysable element in every psychical event" is not itself an event (MiND No. 45, p. 66), seems hardly wanted when we know what we mean by an event. Obviously the whole life of a man is an event, is a piece of new duration, though no event to the man. And, apart from that, changes in the intensity of the element would, of course, be events ; as would be also the changes in the relation of that element to others. Mr. Ward, I presume, has argued from some meaning which he attaches to fact and I do not. But my object is merely to find a plain way of barring metaphysics out of psychology, and I am far from asserting that another way cannot be found, though an "individualistic standpoint" is, I am sure, no solution. Unless this end is reached somehow, the amount of metaphysics to be introduced is limited merely by the inclination or the knowledge of the psychologist. I say advisedly that I do not know a single metaphysical question which can be ruled out of psychology on principle, if any single one is let in ; and I would call upon every English psychologist to face this problem without reserve, and to come either to an understanding or at least to a clear issue.