NOT THE METHOD OF PSYCHOLOGY. 1 49 



protoplasm into beings whr) may be reasonably sup- 

 'posed to be incalculably^ superior to existing man, 

 and science cannot possibly make any single term 

 of this development the measure of all things. To 

 understand that development it must be of supreme 

 importance to discover the origins of what is in 

 what was, and its destiny and final condition in 

 what will be, but it is of subordinate interest to 

 know what it happens to be at any fleeting moment 

 of its evolution; The actual condition, therefore, of 

 the human mind cannot by itself afford a universal 

 criterion of the world ; for It is necessarily imperfect 

 and points back to a past out of which it has deve- 

 loped, and forwards to a future which it fore- 

 shadows. The fact that the mind has a history is 

 fatal to the claims of the psychological method; for 

 it destroys the final authority of its actual deliver- 

 ances. And of that history the- psychological, 

 method cannot take account without ceasing to be 

 psychological, and submitting to the restrictions of 

 historical and metaphysical methods. 



And besides this fatal disability, the psychological, 

 method Involves other inherent defects. 



It is particularly liable to the vice of false abstract- 

 ion. Not only is it constantly tempted to^ draw 

 hard and fast lines between the various " faculties "' 

 of the soul and to forget its fundamental unity, but. 

 It Is bound to repeat the same error in its treatment 

 of the relation of the mind to '* external " things, 

 and to consider it in isolation from the world In 

 which it lives. It cannot treat the mind and the 

 world as different aspects of the same fact, as dif- 

 ferent sides of the same stress, as the mutually im.- 

 plicated action and reaction of interacting factors. 

 And yet it may be boldly laid down that no ex- 



