THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 189 



Bcholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, tlie 

 faculties, the ego, the liberum arhitrium indifferentice, etc. 

 John Mill, in replying to him,* says : 



"It might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studied 

 through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our per- 

 ceiving it, but the moment after: and this is really the mode in which 

 our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We 

 reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its 

 impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways, 

 we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to 

 have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely have 

 affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We 

 know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or 

 by memory the moment after; in either case, by direct knowledge, and 

 not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by 

 their results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argu- 

 ment. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe." 



Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from 

 Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of 

 practiced truth about the- matter. Even the writers who 

 insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner 

 apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with 

 this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it, a 

 moment later. No one has emphasized more sharply than 

 Brentano himself the difference between the immediate 

 feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent re- 

 flective act. But which mode of consciousness of it is that 

 which the psychologist must depend on ? If to have feel- 

 ings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies 

 in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones. 

 But the psychologist must not only liave his mental states 

 in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and 

 write about them, name them, classify and compare them 

 and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they 

 are their own property ; it is only post-mortem that they be- 

 come his prey.f And as in the naming, classing, and know- 



* Auguste Comte and Positivism, 3d edition (1882), p 64. 



f Wundt says: " The first rule for utilizing inward observation con- 

 sists in taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unex- 

 pected, and not intentionally brought about. . . . First it is beet as far as 

 possible to rely on Memory and not on immediate Apprehension. . . . 



