Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/43

Rh and not rather something else which I must proceed to say for you!

Nor is interpretation always easy. The distinctions, as they are left expressed by Professor James, are not infrequently too clear-cut, if I may so say. They are made in rather too highly colored, or too coarse and heavy, lines. Thus the scientific principle of continuity seems violated, — doubtless, often, where it would no longer seem to be, if we felt at liberty to disregard the first intent and inevitable effect of the author's language. Nature and reality, we are forced to maintain, nowhere draw such plain' lines. In the chapter on "The Mind-Stuff Theory," for example, the author appears to deny all differences in the complexity of mental states as recognizably dependent upon multiplicity of factors, or upon degrees of clearness, in the field of consciousness.

The fuller significance of such general remark upon the character of these volumes will become more obvious as we subject to discussion the view they maintain regarding the nature and method of psychological science. What, then, does Professor James understand psychology to be; and how does he propose to give to his own psychological opinions the character of a science? The answer to this twofold inquiry will introduce another closely connected: What does he conceive to be the relation between metaphysics and psychology as a "natural science"?

Professor James is not in sympathy with the somewhat finical objection of Dr. Ward, who, as is well known, denies that we can define the field of psychological science as we can that belonging to any one of the particular sciences of nature. In the opening sentence of these volumes we are told: "Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions." What are the phenomena of mental life, we are at once further informed; they are so-called "feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like." If we are disposed, in the interests of convenience, to seek for some common term applicable to all such phenomena, "states of consciousness," or "mental states," is the term ordinarily adopted.