J.—PSYCHOLOGY 181 
make use in systematising and explaining their selected data, without a 
previous examination of their source of origin, just taking them for 
granted or as obvious, we are extremely likely to give them precedence 
over all others, and to suppose that they possess a greater validity than 
others, or even that they alone are valid. In this way, it would seem that 
commonly accepted principles of physical science, such as those of deter- 
minism or the conservation of energy, have come to be regarded not only 
as of supreme validity in physics, but even as strictly applicable also to 
psychological events, including those from which, by way of conceptual 
construction, they have been derived. J am here in no way trying to argue 
that these principles and postulates are not true. ‘There may be auniverse 
of physical objects, in which energy is conserved, and all events rigidly 
determined. What I am arguing is that these thought-things are in- 
ferential constructions from sensory phenomena, which are possible only 
because of experiences other than sensory and phenomenal, and that they 
must not be permitted to displace or contradict those very experiences in 
virtue of which they are built up. If we had worked backwards in the 
history of the evolution of the notion of causality, instead of forwards as 
we have done, we should have found that we were leaving the region of 
remote inference for that of proximate inference, and this again for that of 
experience pure and simple, until at last we reach the immediate experience 
of the self as actively engaged with its mental objects. We should have 
reached then the central core, so to speak, of all experience. And here 
we find, not merely a concept nor a phenomenon, but an actual thing, or 
active substance existing in itself, from which the notions of thinghood, 
substance and activity are abstracted ; we find here an efficient cause 
actually producing its effects, such as remembering a forgotten event or 
altering the character of phenomena by willing to do so, and from this the 
concept of efficiency is derived ; we find a substantial cause in multiform 
relations with sensed-things and thought-things, among which is the goal 
relation, whence the idea of finality or teleology arises. 
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF CONCEPT FORMATION. 
From such experiences as these, to which we apply relations likewise 
experienced, we derive the proximate inferences such as those of reten- 
tiveness or mental energy, to which allusion has already been made. 
From them also, as well as from our immediate experiences of the appre- 
hension of relations and the production of correlates, we infer the proxi- 
mate principles of noetic eduction. And, lastly, from them again, by 
further applications of relations to them, to phenomena, and to correlates 
already produced in our thought, we reach the far more remote inferences 
of which use is made in the sciences of Nature ; for here we refer our 
experiences to transexperiential, extra-mental causes. But the grandiose 
system of the natural sciences as a whole stands in virtue of these original 
experiences ; and it would crumble away into less than dust did they not 
guarantee it. 
It is for this reason, provided the meaning of the term be not limited 
to sensory experience only, but be extended to all and everything that may 
