Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/183

Rh If clarified experience is subverted by logic, we can of course become sceptics; but it is safer and wiser to wait awhile. Experience may become more clarified, our premises may prove to be at fault, even our syllogisms may be false. When it is said that a psychologist must be either an interactionist of a parallelist, and we find insurmountable difficulties in the way of his being either, the trouble may be with the original assumptions. Matter and consciousness may not be two entities set over against each other. A perception may be both a part of my consciousness and a part of the physical world; an object may be at the same time in a world of matter in motion and in the microcosm of my individual mind. As my colleague, Professor Dewey, starting from an idealistic standpoint, claims, we may simply be giving different names to activity when it is tensional and when it is relatively stable; or as my colleague, Professor Woodbridge, starting from a realistic standpoint, suggests, the relation of consciousness to objects may be analogous to that of space to objects.

As I have said, the relations of mind to body and the distinction between consciousness and matter are the last word of a philosophy that is not yet written, and I have no competence or wish to discuss them here. But the task has been assigned to me of considering the scope, conceptions and methods of psychology, and it is my business to define the field of psychology or to acknowledge my inability to do so. I must choose the latter alternative. I can only say that psychology is what the psychologist is interested in qua psychologist. If it is said that this is tautological, it may be replied that tautology is characteristic of definitions. If psychology is defined as the 'science of mind' or, what in my opinion is better, 'the science of minds' the tautology is equal, and it appears to be more possible to determine by an inductive study the professional interests of psychologists than to define the nature of mind or consciousness. Further, I am not convinced that psychology should be limited to the study of consciousness as such, in so far as this can be set off from the physical world. Psychology apart from consciousness is doubtless an absurdity, but so also is mathematics or botany. I admire the products of the Herbartian school and the ever-increasing acuteness of introspective analysis from Locke to Ward. All this forms an important chapter in modern psychology; but the positive scientific results are small in quantity when compared with the objective experimental work accomplished in the past fifty years. There is no conflict between introspective analysis and objective experiment—on the contrary, they should and do continually cooperate. But the rather widespread notion that there is no psychology apart from introspection is refuted by the brute argument of accomplished fact.