Page:Mind and the Brain (1907).djvu/171

 an organism, of an organised individual. . . . Psychology, in short, considers the world from an individual and subjective point of view, while the science of physics studies it as if it were independent of us.”

Over these definitions by point of view, one might quibble a little; for those who thus define psychology are not always consistent with themselves. In other passages of their writings they do not fail to oppose psychical to physiological phenomena, and they proclaim the irreducible heterogeneity of these two orders of phenomena and the impossibility of seeing in physics the producing cause of the moral. Ebbinghaus is certainly one of the modern writers who have most strongly insisted on this idea of opposition between the physiological and the psychical, and he is a convinced dualist. Now I do not very clearly understand in what the principle of heterogeneity can consist to a mind which admits, on the other hand, that psychology does not differ from the physical sciences by its content.

However, I confine myself here to criticising the consequences and not the starting point. The definition of the psychical phenomenon by the point of view seems to me correct, although it has more concision than clearness; for it rests especially upon a material metaphor, and the expression “point of view” hardly applies except