Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/146

128 negative terms. (4) There are many well-recognized conscious states which may obviously be readily confused with imageless thought. This suggests either that the analysis is not yet complete, or that the thing analyzed is not really a content of consciousness.

For the progress of psychology its independence must be secured. The first step along this line must be the freeing of the province of sensation from the domination of physiology. A comprehensive science of psychophysics can be built up better by the independent development of physiology and psychology than by "their narrow companionship." Psychology in the past has been content to show "upon what conditions our complex experiences and their modifications rested," and has not attempted to "show how the elements of our experience combined to give complex experiences." As a method, introspection is insufficient to meet all cases; another method must be devised by which the properties of the elements of experience can be determined. "We must follow the example of the sister sciences of nature and converge the efforts of all pure mental science upon the problems of the constitution of experience and its fundamental laws," and it is in terms of these problems that the author gives an account of certain phases of experience. The author deals with the typical characteristics of sensation, the measurement of experience, secondary modifications of experience, feeling, and recognition. He summarizes the result of his treatment as the probability "that sensations are the only elements of experience and that all apparently different states of mind are modifications which result from the integration of these sensations in relation to some common attribute." However it is the method of his treatment rather than his results to which Mr. Watt would call attention.

The two constituents of mental development, the general character of which may be described as adaptation, are systems of ideas and systems of habits. The relation of these two factors may be stated thus: "The system of habits gives to ideal activity its point of origin and its direction; the system of ideas gives to habit a telic value, and maintains its commensurability with an enlarging environment. Without habit experience would be an irrational chaos; without ideas it would have no existence."

In an article in the International Journal of Ethics for July, 1910, the moral ideal is characterized by the writer as a parity of the elements of plurality and