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136 the subjective world, is insufficient, seeing that in great part of his work the psychologist is bound to assume the correlation of mind and body, and the existence of an external cause of impressions, I reply that, on its physiological or experimental side, psychology simply places itself at the point of view of the other sciences. It is now as purely objective as it was before purely subjective. It takes up its position in the object from the outset, and treats subjective facts themselves as objective, i.e. as mere appendages or accompaniments of the objective facts of nerve and brain. Psychology is thus either purely subjective or purely objective in its standpoint, according as we look at it. What it does not deal with is the nature of the relation between the subject and the object, which is exemplified in every act of knowledge.

Now it is the essential function of epistemology to deal with this very relation, to investigate it on the side of its validity, its truth. With what right do we pass beyond our subjective states? What is the ground of our belief in an independent world? Our cognitive states appear to refer themselves to a reality which we know by their means. Epistemology does not, like psychology, rest in the appearance. It seeks to determine whether the appearance is true, and, if true, in what sense precisely it is to be understood. The point on which psychology is dumb, forms the central problem of epistemological science. What is reality, the epistemologist asks. Is there any reality beyond the conscious states themselves and their connections? If there is, in what sense can we be said to know it? Is knowledge, inference, or belief, the most appropriate word to use in the circumstances? The fundamental question of external perception thus broadens out into a general consideration of the foundations of belief. And, accordingly, the whole inquiry might be fitly enough so described in a more generalized fashion namely, as an inquiry into "the foundations of belief." So it is described by Mr. Arthur Balfour in the sub-title of his Defence of Philosophic Doubt, a book which may be regarded as one of the most brilliant of recent English contributions towards an epistemology or theory of knowledge in the strict sense of