318 PSYCHOLOGY. 



chapter here, were it not that a few additional words will 

 set the truth in a still clearer light. 



DOUBT. 



There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) 

 would not sa}^ that things come to us in the first instance 

 as ideas; and that if we take them for realities, it is because 

 we odd something to them, namely, the predicate of having 

 also ' real existence outside of our thought.' This notion that 

 a higher faculty than the mere having of a conscious con- 

 tent is needed to make us know anything real by its means 

 has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the 

 tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. 

 Just as sensations must come as inward affections and then 

 be 'extradited ;' as objects of memory must ajDpear at first 

 as presently unrealities, and subsequently be 'projected' 

 backwards as past realities ; so conceptions must be entia 

 rationis till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look 

 beyond the ego, into the real extra-mentsil world ; — so runs 

 the orthodox and poj)ular account. 



And there is no question that this is a true account of 

 the way in which many of our later beliefs come to pass. 

 The logical distinction between the bare thought of an object 

 and belief in the object's reality is often a chronological 

 distinction as welL The having and the crediting of an 



or demand, Ibat I posit, postulate, actively construct on the basis of sense- 

 data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers. . . . 



Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end? All 



these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is 

 neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the tc/ll 

 to have an external world Whatever consciousness contains, reason will 

 persist in spontaneouslj' adding the thought: ' But there shall be something 

 beyond this.' . . . The popular assurance of an external world is Wm fixed 

 determination to make one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of 

 Philosophy, p. 304 — the italics are my own.) This immixture of the will 

 appears most flagrantly in the fact that although external matter is 

 doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own are never doubted. 

 We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense with them. 

 Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of 

 communing souls. A ps^'chic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our 

 wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.— 

 Chapters ix and x of Prof. Royce's work are on the whole the clearest 

 account of the psychology of- belief with which I am acquainted. 



