196 PSYcnoLOoy 



As each object may coma and go, be forgotten and then 

 thought of .again, it is hekl that the thought of it has a '^xe- 

 cisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility. 

 The thoiight of the object's recurrent identity is regarded 

 as the identity of its recurrent thought; and the perceptions 

 of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally 

 conceived to be brought about only through a multiplic- 

 ity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The con- 

 tinuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its 

 place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is 

 preached, for the existence of which no good introspective 

 grounds can be brought forward, and out of which pres- 

 ently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the 

 heritage of woe of students of the mind. 



These words are meant to impeacu the entire Englisli 

 psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entire 

 German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they 

 both treat 'ideas' as separate subjective entities that come 

 and go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer. 

 Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated by still other 

 snares. 



' The Psychologist's Fallacy.' The great snare of the psy- 

 cliologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the 

 mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall 

 hereafter call this the 'psychologist's fallacy' par excellence. 

 For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame. 

 The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands out- 

 side of the mental state he speaks of. Both itseK and its 

 object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state 

 (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other 

 way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that 

 object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same 

 object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the 

 thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which 

 he knows it, although this is often veiy far from being the 

 ca.se.* The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced 

 into our science by this means. The so-called question of 

 presentative or representative perception, of whether an 



* Compare B. P. Bowne's Metaphj-sics (1882), p. 408. 



