Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/48

32. It is probably due to this attempt that we so frequently find Professor James holding up to ridicule all the different forms of metaphysical hypothesis. It is perhaps due to the consciousness of failure that so much of metaphysics is — albeit in a somewhat clandestine manner — freely introduced. On the one hand, the "mind-stuff theory," and the theory of associated psychic factors, as well as the views of Wundt and Helmholtz respecting the need of "psychic synthesis," are rather flippantly set aside as too metaphysical. The ontology of "spiritualistic philosophy" is sometimes (e.g. I, p. 500 f.) caricatured rather than fairly criticised. But, on the other hand, we find Professor James inclined deliberately to admit, and actually making his theory dependent upon, not a few metaphysical postulates of his own.

Similar reasons may explain the attitude of these volumes, already noticed, toward a large part of modern empirical psychology. Obviously the author, while writing on psychology as a natural science, is "bored" (I, p. 192) by so much minute analysis, painstaking collection of statistics, and disproportionate meagreness of scientific results. His discussion of Fechner's law closes (I, p. 549) with the humorous declaration : "It would be terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our science forever with his patient whimseys, and, in a world so full of more nutritious objects of attention, compel all future students to plough through the difficulties, not only of his own works, but of the still drier ones written in his refutation." We have already seen how the elaborate attempts of writers like Herbart and Spencer, to build up an account of complex states of consciousness out of different elementary psychic factors, impresses Professor James.

But what, let us inquire, are we to substitute for this patient work of analysis in our effort to render psychology a science of the order called "natural"? Professor James, so far as he remains true to his own conception of psychology, can only answer with two chapters on "The Functions of the Brain" and "On some General Conditions of the Brain-Activity," and with various exceedingly thin and dubious diagrammatic