THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 197 



object is present to the thought that thinks it by a coun- 

 terfeit image of itself, or directly and without any interven- 

 ing image at all ; the question of nominalism and concep- 

 tualism, of the shape in which things are present when only 

 a general notion of them is before the mind ; are compara- 

 tively easy questions when once the psychologist's fallacy 

 is eliminated from their treatment, — as we shall ere long 

 see (in Chapter XII). 



Another vm^iety of the psychologist's fallacy is the as- 

 sumption that the mental state studied Qiiiist be conscioiis of it-- 

 self as the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state is 

 aware of itself only from within ; it grasps what we call its 

 own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the 

 contrary, is aw^are of it from without, and know's its relations 

 with all sorts of other things. What the thought sees is 

 only its own object ; what the psychologist sees is the 

 thought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all 

 the rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore, 

 in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's point 

 of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are 

 only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we 

 knoAV the consciousness is, for what it is a consciousness of 

 and counting its outAvard, and so to speak j^hysical, relations 

 with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which 

 we set it down as aware. Crude as such a confusion of 

 standj)oints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is never- 

 theless a snare into which no psychologist has kej)t himself 

 at all times from falling, and w^hicli forms almost the entire 

 stock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watch- 

 ful against its subtly corrupting influence. 



Summary. To sum up the chapter, Psychology assumes 

 that thoughts successively occur, and that they know objects 

 in a world which the psychologist also knows. These thoughts 

 are the subjective data of lohich he treats, and their relations to 

 their objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the ivorld constitute 

 the suhject-matter of psychologic science. Its methods are 

 introspection, experimentation, and comparison. But intro- 

 spection is no sure guide to truths about our mental states j 

 and in particular the poverty of the psychological vocabu. 



