Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/454

 J. DEWEY, PSYCHOLOGY. 441 the opposition of Knowledge and Feeling becomes reconciled. The misfortune of such reconciliation is that the " Will " so construed does nothing to remove the need of still treating Will as a distinguishable mental phase among the others : and the double sense is confusing. The account taken of Sensation gives perhaps the simplest measure of the book's quality. The main results of recent inquiry about the Senses are well and clearly expounded, and they are set out in a connexion which makes them thoroughly serviceable for one psychological purpose at least. Prof. Dewey has a very distinct notion of the difference between the actual facts or events of mental life and the scientific abstractions by means of which it is sought to comprehend them. Accordingly he distinguishes with excellent effect, under the head of Know- ledge, the three topics of " Elements," "Processes" and " Stages". The " Stages " Perception, Memory, Imagination, Thinking, Intuition are taken last, as representing, so far as is scienti- fically possible, what actually goes on in the way of cognition ; the order here again being determined by the view that there is a certain abstractness in all the others till in " Intuition " the ful- ness of knowledge "knowledge of an individual" is reached. Between " Processes " and " Elements," the psychological prob- lem of Knowledge is aptly conceived as that of the elaboration of sensations " on the one hand into the objects known, and on the other into the subject knowing" (p. 81), or (p. 84) their transformation into a " world of objects, relations and ideals " and into " the self which knows and idealises ". Sensations are, thus, clearly of account for Knowledge as elements, to be worked up by the processes which Prof. Dewey finds to be respectively for world and self Apperception (with Association, Dissociation, Attention, as its "kinds") and Retention. But in the earlier introductory section (p. 25) it had been laid down that also the general problem of Psychology was none other than to understand how a raw " material " became worked up by certain " processes" into " results'' described as "the concrete forms of consciousness, the actual ideas, emotions and volitions ". Now the raw material is in all cases alike of a sensuous character ; at least, it is with none other than sensuous states that the exposi- tion of Feeling and Will, as well as of Knowledge, is made to begin. But, whereas the general scheme of treatment, from elements through processes to results, is, as we have seen, effec- tively carried through in the case of Knowledge, there is no attempt to maintain it for the other phases of Mind ; the whole exposition in their case resolving itself into a description (for Feeling, as already said, a very good one) of what, in Prof. Dewey's language, may be called either " stages " or " results ". There is, of course, a good reason for this, though it does not appear to be anywhere explicitly stated. It is that " processes " certainly, and "elements" in the main, have once for all been