Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/448

 436 j. SULLY' s OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY. important portion of knowledge that is commonly called sense- perception, and taking for isolated treatment the conditions under which affection of the bodily mechanism results in sense-percep- tions, we must not allow the phraseology we employ to induce us to accept sensations, or sensuous atoms, or shocks, or whatever they may be called, as facts of the mental life. Mr. Sully's treatment of sensations, full and painstaking as it is in reference to the special researches that have yielded so much knowledge of the mechanism of sense, lacks the clear determination of these as mere elements, factors of the unique state of knowing, and is, moreover, perplexed by the want of a general statement correla- ting the several parts. His view of perception is difficult to grasp, and it would have added to the value of his exposition had he quite marked off the problem of localisation from the discussion of the other characteristics which he assigns to perception. It might be well did psychologists agree to employ the term Intui- tions to indicate that aspect of the percept in which it is regarded merely as sensuous content plus the additional feature of space- determination. But both in regard to localisation and in regard to the additional characteristics of the percept, Mr. Sully's account would have been improved by following more deliberately the genetic method, and including a fuller treatment of that which seems to me the key to the whole process, our determina- tion of the body. The predicates by which we assign specific meaning to the so-called external thing are entirely relative to the body, and what we call the reality of a perceived thing has no significance save when viewed in relation to the reality of the body. Our apprehension of an external thing is an excessively complex fact, but we can trace with considerable success the mode in which out of the primitive opposition of self and object there gradually grows up on the one hand the more definite con- ception of the empirical self, and correlatively, on the other hand, the determination by ever new features of that which is not self. The propositions that there is no reality save as the counter term of the real activity of self, and that the reality of the external thing perceived is a more complex determination relative to the recog- nised reality of the body, throw light on many perplexing points of special psychology. Thus, e.g., Mr. Sully seems to me uncer- tain with respect to the nature of Belief, and to be inclined to regard it as a unique fact, influenced by and influencing Know- ledge, Feeling and Will, but distinct from them. At the same time, he thinks that knowledge is on its subjective side believing, that is to say, would substitute belief for knowledge as the main fact of mind. No doubt the conditions of belief are numerous, and, as with all other facts of mind, differences will appear according to the complexity of the stage of mental life at which belief is being viewed. But the connexion between belief and the notion of reality points the way towards an explanation of its nature and its relations to the other facts of mind. Eeality has