Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/66

50 although it is independent of the frequency of experience, is a problem with which cerebral psychology may cope. The origin of the "necessary and eternal" Professor James finds in certain "random irradiations and re-settlements of our ideas, which supervene upon experience, and constitute our free mental play"; and these aforesaid changes in our thoughts and feelings " are due entirely to secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from brain to brain, even though the brain be exposed to exactly the same outer relations." Thus "the higher thought-processes owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings and fermentations of dough . . . than to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates came to be compounded."

This substitute for Mr. Spencer's theory we leave to whatever fate it may have at the hands of cerebral physiology, when studied from the evolutionary point of view; but we have the very solemn and even pathetic feeling that somehow we have wandered far from the science of psychology. We sympathize, therefore, most deeply with the author as he closes this interesting chapter — which, by the way, will undoubtedly seem unsatisfactory to every school of psychological opinion — with the feeling that one "clearly perceives 'the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night.'"

Nevertheless, we do most confidently believe that modern psychology is amply entitled to be called a science; and even — if you please — "a natural science." It is a science, because it has a sufficiently well-defined field of phenomena, which it undertakes to describe and to explain ; and because it has ample data, not only for description but also for explanation of these phenomena. All the states of consciousness, as such, constitute this field; they offer the problems to the psychologist. In the effort to solve these problems his science, like every other genuine inductive science, moves in two directions. It analyzes what is relatively very complex into what is relatively simple and elementary; and it points out the conditions under which, and the terms — so to speak — on which the latter combine into the former. Of course, in doing this the psychologist must not