Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/444

 432 j. SULLY'S OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY. impressed with the conviction that an immense amount of labour must yet be expended in merely clearing the way for a sound view. Mr. Sully emphasises the position that Psychology is a science, and that the psychologist must proceed after the recognised scientific method to classify his facts, to refer them to their conditions, and to reduce the complex mass to general laws or order. With all this one can have no quarrel, for nothing is implied as to the nature of the facts, and no one would question that if the facts are to be known, are to be reduced into the systematic form of a known body of truths, the processes to be applied are those of knowledge. The difficulties arise with the next step, when a statement, however brief, is offered as to the nature of the facts. Here Mr. Sully leaves us in some obscurity. He uses the characteristic of inner experience as marking off the facts of mind from those of nature, and he lays stress upon Intro- spection as the mode by which inner experience is brought before the thinking mind. Now it does not seem, to me that the dis- tinction of inner and outer experience will carry us very far, and it is certain that the distinction is far from being so clear as might at first glance appear. Outer experience, Mr. Sully is well aware, is just as much a problem for the psychologist as that which is contrasted with it. And if we turn the opposition into the more objective phrase, outer and inner facts, we are left without any data by which to determine the precise nature of the latter. The contrast between inner and outer facts as the psychologist treats it is a highly complicated and involved act of mind, and we can hardly afford to start with it as our most elementary distinction. Nor will the negative mark, non-occu- pancy of space, avail much. It may be possible in the course of psychological analysis to explain how it comes about that the individual distinguishes his own mental life from the larger world and characterises it as opposed radically to the extended, space- occupying things known to him ; but if we are to start with this feature, we must express it in such terms as shall show its true place in the history of the individual's mind. The term Intro- spection, finally, has this of danger in it, that it inevitably leads one to regard the facts of mind as presenting exactly the same formal aspect, aspect as known fact, to the introspective observer that external facts offer to him when percipient. They are taken to be isolated, separable objects, inner in nature, but connected in ways identical with the observable connexions of natural facts. One might even question whether the term Introspection should be allowed to hold the place it does in psy- chological treatises. It will hardly be maintained that it is by a special act the individual comes to know that he has a mental life, a life which he distinguishes from so-called external things ; aod if it be said, that nevertheless it is by introspection he obtains a scientific knowledge of this life, one must point out