Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/577

 IV. DISCUSSION. MR. F. H. BKADLEY'S ANALYSIS OF MIND. By JAMES WAED. IN the last number of MIND (pp. 354 ff.), Mr. Bradley has further expounded those views of his concerning general psychology which I had occasion to criticise incidentally in the number but one previous. The main purpose of my article was to exhibit certain imperfections of psychological terminology. For this imperfection, I conceived, the subject-matter of the science is to blame rather than its exponents, and I was fully sensible of the truth of Prof. Bain's remark, that "it will be long ere we attain an unimpeachable phraseology for the highest generalities of mind". Still it seems always worth while to see what is faulty in our work even if we cannot straightway correct it. I ventured accordingly to institute a comparison between the logical exactness of physical definitions and the "varying use of terms involving incompatible implications and the surreptitious changes of standpoint that mark even the clearest psychological writing". It was in this connexion that I came across Mr. Bradley's article on "Attention" in MIND No. 43. It was not within my purpose to discuss his views in detail : my contention as regards him was merely that his fundamental conceptions and his method were false ; and in venturing now to remark further upon these as they appear in his last article, I do not purpose to touch one way or other on its main theme the psychological genesis of Thought. Mr. Bradley's main position, as I understand it, may be stated thus : All psychical facts are presentations, and, symbolising presentations as a, b, c, the laws of psychology are the laws of the interaction of such a, b, c, that is, of their differentiations, conjunctions, conflicts, fusions, associations and so forth. All that is covered by the terms Consciousness or Mind is resolvable into various combinations or relations of these psychical a, b, c: as there is no water till oxygen and hydrogen combine as H.,O, so there is no self or subject and no activity till the interactions of presentations "generate" the appropriate "groups ". Mr. Brad- ley does not merely say : The subject at the beginning does not know itself a statement which perhaps no one would question. What he says is : There is nothing but feeling there. Out of an originally undifferentiated x arise in accordance with psychical laws the subject, objects and activity, which others maintain are implied in the very conception of psychical existence, and which, they hold, must be thought by the psychologist in de-