THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY 609 



of the subjective as psychic. This movement is that described in 

 modern genetic psychology as "ejection": the reading of the sub- 

 jective into the external and the interpretation of the latter in terms 

 of some aspect of the world of thought. This reached its clear state- 

 ment in Plato's doctrine of "ideas," that is, so far as the "idea" it- 

 self was defined. It required a theory of the idea, however, only so 

 far as that conception was to serve the metaphysical purpose. It 

 did not require, nor did it receive, independent treatment, as the 

 object of scientific research or even as content of consciousness. 

 The dualism, however, was only a mediating phase of the return to 

 a deeper monism or idealism: that of the unity of the particular 

 and the universal. And in Aristotle, whose scientific impulse was 

 strong, this reading of the subjective into the objective remained - 

 in the doctrine of matter and form a way of accounting for the 

 organic character of the presented and objective world. It did not 

 become a way of detaching the subjective. This is to say that 

 Aristotle's point of view, in discussing the facts of mind, is more 

 biological than psychic or psychological. Mind has definition as the 

 form of the animal body; and while this implies a reciprocal defini- 

 tion of body, as material for the realization of form, nevertheless 

 the emphasis is not on mind as such. 1 



Aristotle illustrates, indeed, an important fact in the history of 

 science in general : the fact that positivism may be embodied in a sci- 

 entific method before the criticism of the material is well advanced, 

 and that the sciences of the objective order are usually well along be- 

 fore the corresponding sciences of the subjective order attain their 

 emancipation. The reason of this limitation in the case of Aristotle 

 appears when we turn again to the parallelism between the individ- 

 ual's and the race's growth in self-consciousness. The embodiment 

 of the thought-content in things, by "ejection," or, as the anthro- 

 pologists say, by "personification," suffices for a theory of the world 

 which is animistic and vitalized, for hylozoism, that is. But this 

 does not go beyond Plato. The next step is to reach, with Aristotle, 

 a naturalism of the objective order, by the correction and limitation 

 of the animistic concept. This the individual does on his part by the 

 return movement of his thought, whereby he reabsorbs a body of 

 predicates into the "inner" sphere. The psychic becomes, by this 

 movement, the theatre of the more lawless, capricious, and un- 

 manageable phases of appearance, and the world order remains 

 what is left, the regular, the manageable, the lawful. The fixed, 

 before neglected, now becomes the essence of things. It is, no doubt, 

 a practical distinction at first, and only afterwards becomes the 



1 This is not to say, of course, that Aristotle did not make many valuable 

 contributions to empirical psychology; he did. But still it is true that he did 

 not develop a distinctly psychic method of treating consciousness. 



