634 PSTCHOLOOY. 



not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecales 

 moving to and from each other according to strange laws. 

 Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by 

 outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the 

 latter have been met, more egregiously break down than in 

 the caso of scientific conceptions. The order of scientific 

 thought is quite incongruent either with the way in which 

 reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. 

 Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclu- 

 sively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate 

 essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, 

 and by our classifications leave nothing in its natural 

 neighborhood, but separate the contiguous, and join what 

 the poles divorce. The reality exists as a plenum. All its 

 parts are contemporaneous, each is as real as any other, and 

 each as essential for making the whole just what it is and 

 nothing else. But we can neither experience nor thiuk 

 this plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is 

 a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each 

 other ; * what we think is an abstract system of hypothet 

 ical data and laws.f 



* ' ' The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every 

 instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each 

 chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a 

 multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent ^a multitude 

 of distinct consequents. This supposing it done, will not of itself tell us 

 on which of the antecedents each consequent is invariably attendant. To 

 determine that point, we musi endeavor to effect a separation of the facts 

 from one another, not in our minds only, but in nature. The mental anal- 

 ysis, however, must take place first. And every one knows that in the 

 mode of performing it, one intellect differs immensely from another." 

 (J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1.) 



f I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,' pub- 

 lished in the ' Unitarian Review ' for November 1881, and translated in 

 the Critique Philosophique for January and February 1882. "The con- 

 ceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for the sake of ends that 

 do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received by way of our 

 senses, but are set by our emotional aud practical subjectivity. It is a 

 transformer of the woild of our impressions into a totally different world, 

 the world of our conception; and the transformation is eft'ected in the 

 Interests of our volitional nature, aud for no other purpose whatsoever. 

 Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, 

 fondness for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive 

 would remain for the bruie order of our experience to be remodelled at all. 

 But. as wj have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the re- 



