PEARSON'S GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE. 301 



should feel that I stood in need of a great deal of help from the 

 science of legitimate inference; and, therefore, to avoid running round 

 a circle, I will endeavor to base my theory of legitimate inference upon 

 something less questionable — as well as more germane to the subject — 

 than the true interest of society. 



The remainder of this chapter on the 'Facts of Science' is taken up 

 with a theory of cognition, in which the author falls into the too 

 common error of confounding psychology with logic. He will have it 

 that knowledge is built up out of sense-impressions — a correct enough 

 statement of a conclusion of psychology. Understood, however, as Pro- 

 fessor Pearson understands and applies it, as a statement of the nature 

 of our logical data, of 'the facts of science,' it is altogether incorrect. 

 He tells us that each of us is like the operator at a central telephone 

 office, shut out from the external world, of which he is informed only 

 by sense-impressions. Not at all! Few things are more completely 

 hidden from my observation than those hypothetical elements of 

 thought which the psychologist finds reason to pronounce 'immediate,' 

 in his sense. But the starting point of all our reasoning is not in those 

 sense-impressions, but in our percepts. When we first wake up to the 

 fact that we are thinking beings and can exercise some control over our 

 reasonings, we have to set out upon our intellectual travels from the 

 home where we already find ourselves. Now, this home is the parish 

 of percepts. It is not inside our skulls, either, but out in the open. 

 It is the external world that we directly observe. What passes within 

 we only know as it is mirrored in external objects. In a certain sense, 

 there is such a thing as introspection; but it consists in an interpretation 

 of phenomena presenting themselves as external percepts. We first see 

 blue and red things. It is quite a discovery when we find the eye has 

 anything to do with them, and a discovery still more recondite when 

 we learn that there is an ego behind the eye, to which these qualities 

 properly belong. Our logically initial data are percepts. Those per- 

 cepts are undoubtedly purely psychical, altogether of the nature of 

 thought. They involve three kinds of psychical elements, their quali- 

 ties of feelings, their reaction against my will, and their generalizing or 

 associating element. But all that we find out afterward. I see an ink- 

 stand on the table: that is a percept. Moving my head, I get a different 

 percept of the inkstand. It coalesces with the other. What I call the 

 inkstand is a generalized percept, a quasi-inference from percepts, per- 

 haps I might say a composite-photograph of percepts. In this psychi- 

 cal product is involved an element of resistance to me, which 

 I am obscurely conscious of from the first. Subsequently, when I 

 accept the hypothesis of an inward subject for my thoughts, I yield 

 to that consciousness of resistance and admit the inkstand to the stand- 

 ing of an external object. Still later, I may call this in question. But 



