Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/214

194 194 PSYCHOLOGY. spective and experimental methods. This method pre- supposes a normal psychology of introspection to be estab- lished in its main features. But where the origin of these features, or their dependence upon one another, is in ques- tion, it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenom- enon considered through all its possible variations of type and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own ; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life. The history of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental product, are pressed into the same ser- vice. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such cir- culars be not ranked among the common pests of life. Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. There are great sources of error in the comparative method. The interpretation of the ' psychoses ' of animals, savages, and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the per- sonal equation of the investigator has things very much its own way. A savage will be reported to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the ob- server unduly. A child will be assumed without self-con- sciousness because he talks of himself in the third person, etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Com- parative observations, to be definite, must usually be made to test some pre-existing hypothesis ; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be as candid as you can. THE SOUBCES OF ERBOB IN PSYCHOLOGY, The first of them arises from the Misleading Infiuence of Speech. Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The car- dinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope,