PSYCHOLOGY Ixxxiii 



tortoise. You can create difi&culties about almost anything, 

 even about a running man overtaking a tortoise. Such 

 difficulties are analogous to those mechanical puzzles, which 

 are often extremely difficult to make out, though based on 

 the most simple and elementary of principles : the main 

 law to be observed in making a puzzle (as also in conjuring) 

 is to draw attention q^ the significant feature, and, if 

 possible, to direct it on to insignificant features. 



Now this is just precisely what has happened in psychology. 

 Attention is thrown on to the irrelevant, and withdrawn 

 from the relevant : and the language of centuries has securely 

 fixed the resulting false outlook. Hence we do not find, on 

 studying psychology, a set of simple laws and great principles 

 such as we meet with in physics and chemistry. We find a 

 collection of puzzles of the free-will type — which are only 

 puzzles because they so ingeniously draw attention from 

 every relevant feature in the discussion. And what should 

 be a mere psychological toy becomes the heading of an 

 important chapter of the science. 



Modern psychologists have many such vexatious follies to 

 deal with. We have inherited a psychology that is sodden 

 with metaphysics, and perpetually haunted with unreal 

 entities. We have to discuss it in a terminology framed by 

 our opponents, and wholly unsuited to a true science. Let 

 us firmly assail the pestilential and slovenly habit of attri- 

 buting all things unknown to some psychical entity, invented 

 by ourselves for the occasion, or more usually inherited from 

 our savage ancestors. Lamarck offers us at any rate a 

 valuable object lesson. Convinced as he was of the fallacy 

 to which I have been alluding ; earnest as he was in his 

 attempt to avoid it ; he yet constantly fell into it. He 

 materialised a nervous fluid, with a reservoir, a nucleus, etc. 

 He materialised an " inner feeling " to explain emotions, 

 just as we materiahse a " mind " to explain the various 

 so-called mental processes. He materialised " nature " in 

 much the same way that Bergson does " time," as though 

 they were so many material things. Truly the materialism 



