Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/440

 428 j. SULLY'S OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY. add that it is likewise peculiar to psychology that the liminal difficulties cannot be evaded without the most disastrous conse- quences to the body of the exposition. In the objective sciences, that is, in those portions of knowledge in which the material is, so to speak, one-sided, in which no fact is contemplated save under the form of something capable of being presented as object to a cognitive mind, it is possible to separate the strictly scientific difficulties from so-called metaphysical problems by mere reference to the marked difference of treatment. But it is one of the pro- blems which the psychologist has to handle in limine whether his facts can be viewed as objects merely, and if he be wise he will not allow himself to be misled by any shibboleths of the tribe of science. Terms like 'orderliness,' 'uniformity,' 'law,' have but a formal significance, and must not be supposed to carry with them any decision of the real difficulty as to the nature of the pheno- mena within which order, uniformity, and law are to be mani- fested. Psychologists of a former generation used often to include in their treatment a chapter on the difficulties which originated in the terminology of their science. They rarely exhausted these difficulties, and perhaps there would be no more useful section in a modern scientific treatise on the subject than that which should submit to the most careful treatment the sources of ambiguity in the terms inevitably employed in the investigation. Language, though rich, is far from rich enough to furnish equivalents for all the shades of significance that may call for expression, and, in tracing the development of so enormously complex a fact as the individual mind, the psychologist has constantly to be on his guard against the erroneous identifications of different phenomena that are likely to arise from the employment of identical terms. Words always imply the stage of intelligence in which quite definite recognition of object and objective connexion has been acquired, and cause us therefore serious perplexity when we are called upon to express either a simple phase of thought, or a merely abstracted portion, or the complex fact of recognising an object. It only remains to be added, that the vast extent of the material which the psychologist has to handle makes systematic treatment unusually hard, and perhaps it would not be unfair to say that, whether or not a science of mind be possible, it does not yet exist as a fact. In face of the phenomena of mind, psychology is at present much in the position in which mechanics was to the complicated forms of material change prior to the disclosure of the simplest laws of moving bodies. We are probably only on the way towards arrangement of our facts into relatively simple and complex, and are yet far from the stage at which systematic development of the whole is practicable. It is in view of the general problems arising from the exceeding complexity of the psychological data, the great difficulty of defining their nature,