CHAPTER VI. 



THE MIND STUFF THEORY. 



The reader who found liimself swamped with too much 

 metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse 

 time of it iu this one, which is exclusively metaphysical. 

 Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate 

 effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of 

 psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoreti- 

 cally they are very confused, and one easily makes the ob- 

 scurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until 

 challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. When 

 these assumptions liave once established themselves (as 

 they have a way of doing in our verj^ descriptions of the 

 phenomenal facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them 

 afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essen- 

 tial features of the subject. Tlie only way to prevent this 

 disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them 

 give an articulate account of themselves before letting tliem 

 pass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which 

 I speak is the assumption that our mental states are com- 

 posite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined. 

 This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it 

 almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it is 

 inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, how- 

 ever, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As 

 our own aim is to understand if possible, I make no apology 

 for singling out this particular notion for very explicit 

 treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work. 

 The theory of ' viivd-stuff" is the theory that our mental 

 states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form. 



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