596 PSYCHOLOGY 



lelist in the conflicts with our sister sciences, but the case is differ- 

 ent before the court of common sense. The present writer cannot 

 conceive how the parallelist gets outside the limits of conscious- 

 ness. Why does he want anything to run parallel with the only 

 thing he knows? He becomes at once a subjective idealist, and 

 there may be no harm in that. But when the subjective idealist 

 wants to live in a world with other men, he reinvents the distinc- 

 tions that he had verbally obliterated. What he knows about the 

 physical world is what his senses and the physicists tell him; if he 

 likes to call it all consciousness or the unconscious, mind-stuff, 

 will, or God's thought, this may be emotionally stimulating, but 

 no fact or law is thereby altered. The world may be God's thought, 

 without in the least preventing the parallelist from thinking illog- 

 ically. 



If clarified experience is subverted by logic, we can of course be- 

 come skeptics ; but it is safer and wiser to wait awhile. Experience 

 may become more clarified, our premises may prove to be at fault, 

 even our syllogisms may be false. When it is said that a psychologist 

 must be either an interactionist or a parallelist, and we find insur- 

 mountable difficulties in the way of his being either, the trouble may 

 be with the original assumptions. Matter and consciousness may not 

 be two entities set over against each other. A perception may be 

 both a part of my consciousness and a part of the physical world; 

 an object may be at the same time in a world of matter in motion 

 and in the microcosm of my individual mind. As my colleague, 

 Professor Dewey, starting from an idealistic standpoint, claims, we 

 may simply be giving different names to activity when it is tensional 

 and when it is relatively stable; or as my colleague, Professor Wood- 

 bridge, starting from a realistic standpoint, suggests, the relation 

 of consciousness to objects may be analogous to that of space to 

 objects. 



As I have said, the relations of mind to body and the distinction 

 between consciousness and matter are the last word of a philosophy 

 that is not yet written, and I have no competence or wish to discuss 

 them here. But the task has been assigned to me of considering the 

 scope, conceptions, and methods of psychology, and it is my business 

 to define the field of psychology or to acknowledge my inability to do 

 so. I must choose the latter alternative. I can only say that psych- 

 ology is what the psychologist is interested in qua psychologist. If 

 it is said that this is tautological, it may be replied that tautology is 

 characteristic of definitions. If psychology is defined as the " science 

 of mind " or, what in my opinion is better, " the science of minds," the 

 tautology is equal, and it appears to be more possible to determine by 

 an inductive study the professional interests of psychologists than to 



