SECTION J.—PSYCHOLOGY. 
THE STATUS OF PSYCHOLOGY AS AN 
EMPIRICAL SCIENCE 
ADDRESS BY 
PROF. F. AVELING, 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
As a text for this address, I quote a statement made by a very distinguished 
physicist. Sir Arthur Eddington writes: ‘ Mind is the first and most 
direct thing in our experience ; all else is remote inference.’ Now this 
statement may mean one of several things. It may mean either that we 
directly apprehend the mind itself as an experiencing entity, or that we 
know, and only know directly, phenomena, the objective mental contents 
and subjective states which, as at one time it was widely held, constitute 
our minds or consciousnesses. In this address I shall maintain that we 
know both, the former as an existent in every act of experience, and the 
latter as events within experience. And I shall maintain this for two 
reasons : first, because I find it to be so on introspection ; and, secondly 
(though this perhaps is not a psychological reason), because, unless we 
grant the immediate awareness of the self as existent and active, as well 
as phenomenal occurrences in experience, it is impossible, so it seems to 
me, to account for our belief in an existing external world and for many 
of the conceptual constructions by means of which the various sciences 
attempt to explain it. I do not wish to prejudge the issue of the problem, 
which, as you realise, is an epistemological as well as a psychological one, 
by asserting anything whatever with regard to the nature of this self that 
we experience directly ; but I do wish to assert the reality of the experi- 
ence. For me at least it is as real as the sensory experience in which the 
physical world, including my own body, is revealed to me. 
INADEQUACY OF SENSORY EXPERIENCE. 
There is, then, I maintain, more in ‘ mind ’ than the sensory experiences 
which form the starting-point for physical science. This begins with the 
phenomenological world, a world of objects so-appearing to us ; and, on 
the basis of this experience, abstraction made from the fact that it is 
experience, a physical universe of reference is built up in scientific thought. 
It is thus apparent that physical science, omitting a great deal of experience 
from its purview, makes a selection of experiences. Moreover, in con- 
structing from these the physical universe, it makes use of concepts which 
cannot be discovered among those particular selected experiences that 
form its own peculiar subject-matter. What Eddington calls ‘ remote 
