448 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



traceable to other mental events, assume that they are 

 due to material agency. Similarly those confronted by 

 material changes not easily traceable to mechanical 

 antecedents, have often assumed that they are due to 

 spiritual agency. How can the modern materialist 

 show that he has any better guarantee for his position 

 than the untutored Indian has for his? ... If the 

 continuity of the mechanical process debars us from 

 regarding a movement as due to a volition, it must in 

 like manner debar us from regarding a volition as due 

 to movement, even of brain particles. . . . No analysis 

 can discover in the psychological fact any traces of its 

 supposed physical factors." * 



(c) As physiology has become more modest in 

 realising its own limits of interpretation, and as the 

 psychologist has without mistrust sought to avail 

 himself of all the help the physiologist can give, a 

 more reasonable position has been attained. " Psy- 

 chology is distinguished from the physical sciences 

 inasmuch as their aim is to know the material 

 world, whereas it deals with the question how this 

 knowledge arises." f " Mental processes cannot bo 

 explained as special complications of processes which 

 are not mental, nor can they enter into the composi- 

 tion of such processes." \ " No consideration of the 

 physical antecedents as such needs to be included in 

 any strictly psychological proposition. We take ac- 

 count of them only in so far as they are indispensable 

 helps in determining and defining the nature and 

 order of changes produced in the mind from without 

 The psychologist is primarily concerned not with the 

 antecedents of externally initiated changes, but with 

 these changes themselves, inasmuch as they modify 



Stout, pp. B-6. 



f O. P. Stout, Analytic Psychology, Vol. I., 1896, p. 8. 



* Op. cit., p. 6. 



