64 PART II.SOME IMPORTANT METHODOLOGICAL .TERMS. 



enquiry has been conducted in an unsatisfactory manner, and 

 that whilst normal psychology is yet a primal forest waiting 

 for pioneers to explore it, it is unlikely that any headway can 

 be made at present in matters connected with abnormal psycho- 

 logy. Observation, it is disconcerting to learn, is yet an art 

 almost entirely neglected outside the physical and biological 

 laboratory. So far as the sciences relating to man are concerned, 

 it is very much as if we lived in pre-Baconian days when the 

 need for scrupulously circumspect and varied observation was 

 unsuspected and audacious theorising or abject reliance on 

 authorities constituted usually the alpha and omega of the 

 method employed in discovery. 



Consider, again, M. Henri Bergson's defence of indeterminism. 

 According to him "we are free when our acts emanate from 

 our entire personality" (Les donnees immediates de la con- 

 science, ed. 1906, p. 131); but in so far as we are prompted by 

 external or fragmentary incentives, our conduct, in M. Bergson's 

 opinion, is determined. In a methodological age we should 

 know what to expect of an essay where such a view is ad- 

 vanced. The author would propound his hypothesis, and then 

 proceed to its substantiation. He would be meticulously care- 

 ful to prove that we sometimes act with our whole nature ; 

 that in such instances we are not actuated by external influences 

 either directly or indirectly ; and that a higher or different value 

 is, for certain produced reasons, to be ascribed to decisions of 

 a purely internal nature. Unfortunately methodological pro- 

 cedure has not yet become second nature in man, and so 

 M. Bergson experiences no subjective qualms or objective diffi- 

 culties in concluding his exceedingly interesting psychological 

 study without any serious effort to convince us that we ever 

 act with our whole nature, or that, if we did so, our whole 

 nature is not an external or partially external product. Where 

 the man of science would feel that nothing short of a highly 

 developed science of mind could authorise him to entertain 

 such a hypothesis, the philosopher blandly assumes his facts 

 and is sublimely unconscious that he is merely indulging his 

 roaming fancy. 



M. Bergson is but typical of this attitude of the philosopher 

 towards reality. For instance, Mr. Herbert Spencer, before him, 

 had sought to reconcile religion with science. Without even a 

 casual attempt to elucidate the meaning of religion, he in- 

 genuously postulated that "Religion under all its forms is 

 distinguished from everything else in this, that its subject 

 matter is that which passes the sphere of experience". (First 

 Principles, 1875, p. 17.) By such a procedure everything, of 

 course, can be demonstrated, and that is precisely what philo- 

 sophers unconsciously do, and men of science consciously and 

 severely leave undone. Only a universal conviction that truth 

 can be solely established by scientifically inspired socio-historic 



