Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/209

189 THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 189 scholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, the faculties, the ego, the liberum arbitrium indifferentice, etc. John Mill, in replying to him,* says : " It might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studied through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our per- ceiving it, but the moment after: and this is really the mode in which our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways, we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely have affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or by memory the moment after ; in either case, by direct knowledge, and not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by their results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argu- ment. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe." Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of practical truth about the matter. Even the writers who insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it, a moment later. No one has emphasized more sharply than Brentano himself the difference between the immediate feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent re- flective act. But which mode of consciousness of it is that which the psychologist must depend on ? If to have feel- ings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones. But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and write about them, name them, classify and compare them and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they are their own property ; it is only post-mortem that they be- come his prey.f And as in the naming, classing, and know- f Wundt says: "The first rule for utilizing inward observation con- sists in taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unex- pected, and not intentionally brought about. . . . First it is best as far as possible to rely on Memory and not on immediate Apprehension. . ..
 * Augusts Comte and Positivism, 3d edition (1882), p. 64.