42 Blais dell—Suggestions for Psychologiccd Study. 
trust the senses. As for myself, I have found it satisfactory to seek in 
reason—the supersense cognitive function in its various modes—en¬ 
trance to the intellectual department of mental study and find there 
the ground on which to plant the superstructure of perception by sensa¬ 
tion. It is only because we have the power of rational knowledge that 
we have the power of sensing reality. Reason is the only apprehension. 
Sensation only gives coloring. I would suggest that along this line of 
procedure—for those who have not surrendered the department of psy¬ 
chology, like others, wholly to agnostic theory—will be found relief from 
an otherwise unresolved perplexity. There is no ground for believing in 
a cortical irritation, or in a sensation, or an idea, or for making any 
judgment or using any predicate, unless there be found first in empiri¬ 
cal psychology intimation of a function of rational knowledge. If you 
can not find it by physiological psychology you must seek it by the 
psychology of conciousness. If you say there is no other psychology 
than physiological psychology, your physiological psychology is the fu¬ 
tility of the hypothesis of the dream of a dream. Utter skepticism even 
is a baseless hypothesis which is itself an endless hypothetical series.. 
When we arrive at such a pass we may say with Cicero: “Et mihi ipsi 
diffidem”—“I do not know which end my head is on.” 
6. The only other suggestion I have to make is of a doubt whether 
we have not hitherto done violence to psychology by limiting its range 
to individual mind. The ancient conception of man as having not only 
his end but his significance merely as a fraction of the state, against 
which, in its classic form, Christianity made divine protest, but which 
corporate Christianity too much yielded to, giving away under the in¬ 
tense materialism of the French revolution period, is, in better form 
and under better auspices, reasserting itself in this our new period. 
Ours has been a most beneficent era of the clearing up and differenti¬ 
ating of the individual personality, of which era the French revolution 
was the criminal evangel. Since that baleful morning of blessing, the 
individual has happily, by slow and painful and turbulent process, be¬ 
come identified not only out of the classes into which an utterly un¬ 
sympathetic science had generalized him, but out of the mass of the 
civic society in which selfish social tyranny had lost him, making him 
only a cypher for multiplying its own significance. Now that not only 
the word man has come to mean man, and woman has come to mean 
woman, but each individual man is revealed in the common conscious¬ 
ness as being his own determinate and significant self, and each woman 
as being her own determinate and significant self, and in like manner 
and degree childhood has come to the recognition of his and her signi¬ 
ficant identity also—a process not altogether completed—a splendid re¬ 
integration into a richer integrity of civic society is already putting to 
us the question whether, as our practical philanthropy and patriotism 
are asserting the new gospel of organic solidarity, so the science of man 
