Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/151

No. 2.] nature of the "permanent," or the precise sense in which the "beyond" is to be understood. It may be Mill's permanent possibilities of sensation, it may be the unconscious matter of popular philosophy, it may be an infinite number of monadic consciousnesses, or it may be a system of divine or objective thought. These are further questions, to be determined partly by epistemology, partly by metaphysics, but they all equally presuppose that epistemological dualism which can be denied only by a theory which would be content with the momentary presentations of sense, as they come and go in hopeless entanglement and disarray.

To recapitulate, then. Psychology, assuming the existence of a subject or medium of consciousness, seeks to explain, mainly by the help of association or processes practically similar, how out of the come-and-go of conscious states, there are evolved such subjective facts as perceptions, the belief in an independent real world, and the idea of the Ego or subject himself. It investigates how such ideas and beliefs come to pass, but it does not touch the further question whether they are well-founded or no. They may be a correct account of the real state of things, or they may be illusions; but anyway they are beliefs, subjective facts which may be shown with probability to have arisen in a certain way. And that is enough for psychology which, so far as it sticks to its own last, does not seek to go beyond the inner world of the subject. The external world, so far as psychology treats it, is simply a complex presentation in consciousness, a subjective object: with the extra-conscious or trans-subjective psychology ex vi termini can have no concern. Belief in a trans-subjective world may, indeed, — must, in fact, — be treated by the psychologist. But that belief, again, he treats simply as a subjective fact; he analyzes its constituents and tells us the complex elements of which it is built up; he tells us with great precision what we do believe, but so far as he is a pure psychologist he does not attempt to tell us whether our belief is true, whether we have real warrant for it. On that point he is dumb.

If it is objected that this view of psychology, as limited to