Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/443

 j. SULLY'S OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 431 seem to perceive in Mr. Sully's exposition, is almost certain to weaken the effect of the whole presentation, and to make it to some extent a failure. Highly as I rate the value of Mr. Sully's volume, and much as I admire not only the completeness of knowledge which enables him to muster so many isolated facts but also the acuteness with which he treats a multiplicity of single problems, it does not seem to me that he succeeds in giving one complete, consistent view of the whole phenomena of mind. The apparent conflict of views to which I have referred un- doubtedly connects itself with and depends on the omission from Mr. Sully's volume of any full discussion of the point of view from which the facts of mind are to be treated, i.e., of psycho- logical method. One can understand the reasons which might weigh with a writer to induce him to omit the discussion, espe- cially in the case of a text-book ; for certainly the problem that has to be attacked is of unusual subtlety and complexity. But unfortunately the peculiar nature of psychology renders it quite impossible to dispense with the laborious work of definition and explanation, and an exposition where one can only gather im- perfectly and from isolated parts the general idea of the whole on which the writer proceeds, must find itself embarrassed at various points and have always a certain misleading tendency. Mr. Sully fully recognises that psychology has something peculiar, and invariably couples his description of it as a natural science with some qualifying remark ; wherever he has to deal with the advance in complexity of the mental life, his handling implies a more profound conception of the nature of the facts than is for- mally enunciated ; but he leaves the explicit statement unsaid, and the evil consequences seem to me to be apparent in more than one special disquisition in his volume. For one would not demand a special treatment of the scope and method of psychology were the only result to be the more accurate classification of psychology in relation to natural science and philosophy, though even with that much would be gained. The pressing need is for a clear and unambiguous explanation of what the thinker takes to be the characteristic, peculiar features of the facts he proposes to systematise, an explanation which is but the explicit statement of the kind of consideration that he will apply to the several concrete phenomena as they successively present themselves in the course of his exposition. The diffi- culties in the way of defining one's point of view are so great ; it is so easy to adopt a mode of speech that is radically unsound ; it is so imperative that the one method should be consistently earned out, that the formal discussion of method seems to be imposed as an indispensable obligation on every expounder of psychological science. When one compares the various treatises that represent the cultivation of psychology since the Kantian era, one is struck by the enormous differences in detail that spring from fundamental differences of methodical view, and