Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/216

196 196 PSYCHOLOGY. As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a pre- cisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility. The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded as the identity of its recurrent thought ; and the perceptions of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally conceived to be brought about only through a multiplic- ity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The con- tinuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is preached, for the existence of which no good introspective grounds can be brought forward, and out of which pres- ently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the heritage of woe of students of the mind. These words are meant to impeach the entire English psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entire German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they both treat 'ideas' as separate subjective entities that come and go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer. Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated by still other snares. ' The Psychologist'' s Fallacy.' The great snare of the psy- chologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the ' psychologist's fallacy 'par excellence. For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame. The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands out- side of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which he knows it, although this is often very far from being the case.* The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced into our science by this means. The so-called question of presentative or representative perception, of whether an
 * Compare B. P. Bowne's Metaphysics (1882), p. 408.