THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 195 



and the most compreliensive divisions of our intellectual 

 activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with 

 the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, 

 pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order 

 which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. 

 The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red, 

 blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in 

 both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for 

 outer qualities and for the feelings Avhicli these arouse. But 

 the objective sense is the original sense ; and still to-day 

 we have to describe a large number of sensations by the 

 name of the object from which they have most frequently 

 been got. An orange color, an odor of -sdolets, a cheesy 

 taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall 

 what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for sub- 

 jective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest 

 of them. Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizing 

 one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the 

 mind. Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denote 

 a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a 

 substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which 

 the word shall be the name. But the lack of a word quite 

 as often leads to the directly opposite error. We are then 

 prone to suppose that no entity can be there ; and so we 

 come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be 

 patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly 

 recognized in speech.* It is hard to focus our attention on 

 the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in 

 the descriptive parts of most psychologies. 



But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the 

 dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming 

 our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume 

 that as the objects are, so the thought must be. The 

 thought of several distinct things can only consist of several 

 distinct bits of thought, or ' ideas ; ' that of an abstract or 

 universal object can only be an abstract or universal idea. 



* In English we have not even the generic distinction between the- 

 thing-lhought-of and the-thought-thinking-it, which in German is expressed 

 by the opposition between Oedachtes and Oedanke, in Latin by that between 

 cogitatum and coaitatio. 



