CH. XIV,] LIFE AND MIND. 77 



nerve-centre. It seeks to formulate the conditions under 

 which nervous stimulation and nervous discharge take place. 

 Or it shows how certain feelings are invariably sequent upon 

 certain rearrangements of the molecules composing the nerve* 

 substance. Even if it recognizes, as it does continually recog- 

 nize, some force external to the organism, which causes the 

 molecular rearrangement and the resultant feeling, it never- 

 theless does not concern itself with the relation between the 

 external cause and the internal effect, but only with the 

 internal effect. 



Now, as Mr. Spencer has forcibly pointed out, " so long as 

 we state facts of which all the terms lie within the organism, 

 our facts are anatomical or physiological, and in no degree 

 psychological. Even though the relation with which we are 

 dealing is that between a nervous change and a feeling, it is 

 still not a psychological relation so long as the feeling is 

 regarded merely as connected with the »ervous change, and 

 not as connected with some existence lying outside the 

 organism. . . . For that which distinguishes psychology from 

 the sciences on which it rests, is, tliat each of its propositions 

 takes account both of the connected internal phenomena and 

 of the connected external phenomena to which they refer. 

 In a physiological proposition an inner relation is the essential 

 subject of thought; but in a psychological proposition an 

 outer relation is joined with it as a coessential subject of 

 thought. A relation in the environment rises into coordinate 

 importance with a relation in the organism. The thing con- 

 templated is now a totally different thing. It is not the 

 :x)nnection between the internal phenomena, nor is it the 

 connection between the external phenomena; but it is the 

 connection between these two connections. A psychological pro- 

 position is necessarily compounded of two propositions, of 

 which one concerns the subject and the other concerns the 

 object ; and cannot be expressed without the four terms which 

 these two propositions imply. The distinction may be best 



