ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 523 



forces that hem her in, resolve themselves at last into 

 her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about 

 these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph philo- 

 sophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What 

 generous divination and that superiority in virtue which 

 was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight 

 into nature have failed to do, their spying and scraping, 

 their deadly tenacity and almost diabolical cunning, will 

 doubtless some day bring about. . . . The experimental 

 method has quite changed the face of the science, so far 

 as the latter is a record of the mere work done." 



It is, however, only fair to remark that it has never 

 been the object of any science, and can, therefore, no 

 more be the object of exact psychology, to deal with 

 everything at once, and that psycho-physical science has ) 

 quite as much right to postpone the question, What is ', 

 mind ? l as biological science has had to postpone, or 

 even to eliminate, the question, What is life ? But this 

 comparison reveals also the essential difference between k ; 

 the exact science of life and the exact science of mind. 

 Of life we know only through the observation of living 

 beings, but of mind we have not only the apparent 

 knowledge of its unity, which introspection forces upon 



1 " Sensation, Retentiveness, As- 

 sociation by Contiguity, these are 

 to be our ultimate and sufficient 

 psychological conceptions : the 

 facts of feeling and conation are 

 resolved into facts of sensation ; 

 and all mind-processes held to be 

 not merely conditioned, but ex- 

 plained by brain-processes, which 

 they accompany as epi-phenomena 

 or ' Begleit-erscheinungen.' It is 

 not so long since the world was 



shocked at Lange's mot about a psy- 

 chology without a soul, but the 

 ' modern ' psychology is a psychol- 

 ogy without even consciousness. 

 ' Content of consciousness ' as much 

 as you like, but consciousness itself, 

 consciousness as activity, is not our 

 affair ; we leave that to metaphy- 

 sics, say our 'modern' teachers." 

 (Prof. J. Ward, on " Modern Psy- 

 chology," 'Mind,' 2nd series, vol. ii. 

 p. 55). 



