In the present haste to construct psychology as a natural science cognate to chemistry, physics, and biology, we note much that is premature and confusing, owing to insufficient reflection upon the quality of the phenomena. A consciousness is a natural phenomenon, but we cannot discover and investigate it as we do phenomena of light and electricity. Anger is a phenomenon occurring millions of times every day, but it is a fact which must be discerned and studied by an altogether different method from facts of crystallization, erosion, or plant growth. Psychology is not a science of inspection, but of introspection. If I know I am angry, I know it by a direct self-awareness; if I see a man strike another, and regard this as expressive of a psychosis, and that of a certain kind, anger, this supposed knowledge is analogical realization. One who never was or could be angry could no more investigate anger than a blind man light, and, other things being equal, the more irascible a man is, the better observer of anger he would be. We are not, however, conscious of all our mental processes, and we may be often blinded to the real nature of such we think we have; and as to the psychoses of other beings, especially of the more unlike and remote, we need to be extremely cautious in forming conclusions. It is likely that the mental constitution of organisms differ as widely as the physical, that the mentality of a fish is as diverse from our own as its 372physical structure is unlike our own. The fish may have peculiar psychoses of which we may never gain the least inkling, because we cannot examine its consciousness objectively as we do its fins, its air bladder, and its gills. The psychologist must then be myriad-minded; his fitness is the ductility and range of his psychic capacity. The richness and receptivity of his own mental life must be infinite if he is to come to full knowledge of the whole course of psychism. Thus psychology is marked off from all other science as distinct in subject and method. Its being so individual and subjective is the greatest hindrance to its progress, for science is verifiable knowledge, but how shall we have a method of consciousness verification? A man tells me he has a scar on his left knee, and this I can verify by personal examination if I like, but if he says he is angry, I have no such means of verification, I can only guess by expression. A biologist announces the discovery of a pineal eye in a certain embryo, and straightway the fact may be verified by a host of observers; but if a psychologist announces that he has discovered a new mode of consciousness, the verification is by no means so easy. May not the consciousness be entirely peculiar to him? The psychologist who attempts to verify cannot disclaim the fact simply because he cannot find this act of mind in himself. But an introspective consensus, though extremely difficult as compared with the objective consensus required by objective science, is not impossible, but it requires exceptional gifts and training in introspection. Before psychology can reach any standing a method of subjective verification must be formulated and adhered to as rigidly as corresponding verification is required by objective science. The backwardness of psychology is in this most significant, that while a half-dozen recognised biologists may announce a certain fact, and it is immediately accepted as scientific knowledge, no such action can occur in psychology. The uncertainty of subjective verification is the trouble, and the 373most important step that can be made to-day is a clearly defined basis for an exact verification. That one party should claim there is a feeling of relation, and another that there is no such feeling, marks a crudeness in the most general matters, and points to psychology being about where physiology was when the circulation of the blood was in debate.

But, say the experimental psychologists, subjective verification is impossible; psychology, if it is to become a science, must, like the other sciences, resort to the laboratory, and by definite and exact experiments produce the facts to order, study them by the most approved instruments, and obtain with certainty a knowledge of their laws. Now it is sufficiently easy to experiment on light, sound, and on plant growth in a laboratory, but how can we make consciousness to order with the same certainty? how can we know when we have got a consciousness, what kind it is, etc., except by subjective verification? You certainly cannot see the consciousness or touch it; but you must wholly rely on the subjective report of the individual experimented on as verified by your own consciousness. We have no impassive agent entirely under our control, except in hypnosis, and we cannot secure conditions with the same exactness in testing the intensity of some form of consciousness, as anger, as in testing the tensile strength of iron.

In the physical laboratory we produce certain conditions and we get invariably certain observable and measurable results, but in a psychological laboratory how shall I get with certainty a definite consciousness in a large number of cases and formulate its law? How shall I know at a given moment that the mental act of the agent is what my experiment requires? Moreover, does not experimental psychology by beginning with human consciousness enter rashly upon a very complex field? If it would get results, let it start with the simpler mental life, just as biology has 374founded itself in a study of simplest elements. But how shall psychology get at the consciousness of a clam with the same exactness as biology investigates the circulation of blood in the clam? It is plain, in short, that if we are to have a fruitful experimental psychology, some very important questions of method must first be settled. A method of getting psychoses to order, to obtain the exact reaction required, and knowing and realizing what it is when got, this is a desideratum not yet attained. Further, we must remark that experimentation is itself a psychic act, and sense of experimentation is a disturbing factor in results; that is, a consciousness which is conscious of being experimented on is thereby complicated over mere observation method. This is markedly the case in self-experimentation. Consciousness is not, like an electric current or a sound wave, an objective fact, readily reproducible in the laboratory. And again ethics may interfere with psychical experiment. How far have we a right to incite psychosis for experiment’s sake? How far may psychical vivisection be carried in the name of science? A scientist who should for his own study make an animal or person angry, would be reprobated as would the artist who should incite anger in his model in order to catch artistic effect. However, that there is a vast scope for experimental psychology cannot be denied, and we may expect an indefinite multiplication of artificial psychoses and combinations comparable to the artificial syntheses and new compounds of the chemical laboratory. Mind may develop and act merely on the scientific motive, and accomplish by tour de force a complex field of artificial consciousness quite distinct in origin and nature from natural consciousness. But for the present, at least, we regard not experiment but observation as the main method. Not laboratory, but field work, is most needed. The psychical scientist must go psychologizing, as the botanist goes botanizing. But there is no simple objective 375method as in botany. In order to have insight and interpretative power, there must be constant self-observation. He can know the real nature, conditions, and laws of other minds only so far as he realizes them in himself. If he has never feared, he will never know fear, and if he has never analyzed his own fear, he will not know its factors as occurring in others. All external consciousness is but a projection from the observer’s own consciousness.

But it may be said that mind is but a kind of neural function, and that physiological psychology will give us the true key to consciousness. But if one has never known any psychosis, as fear, directly in himself and indirectly in others, how will he find it in any nerve activities? Nervous activities are significant of psychosis only so far as psychosis is already known. In fact, the sciences of neurosis and psychosis are radically distinct. I stick a pin in my finger, the facts of pain, volition, anger, etc., are of one order knowable only by introspection, the nerve excitation, current and reaction are of another order, constitute a complete circle, and are known only by inspection. Neurology in its own field can afford to ignore psychosis, for it does not find it: it finds only neural changes, and psychology likewise can afford to ignore physiology. These sciences stand self-sufficient, and may develop indefinitely each in its own way without meeting. Divide and conquer. The present mingling of the two is greatly to be deplored. Thus in current books we often find such sentences as this: “The prevalent view hitherto has probably been that the same nervous apparatus which on moderate excitement produces sensations of pressure or temperature, produces feelings of pain when irritated with increased intensity.” (Ladd, Outlines Physiological Psychology, p. 387.)

This confusing of objective and subjective terms, sensation and irritation, is but too frequent in recent treatises. There is no way yet found of discovering psychic facts in 376neural, or neural in psychic, whatever may be their connection and interdependence. If we must have a cross-interpretation, the psychologist has the vantage-ground on the basis of evolution by struggle. Nisus has developed all sense and motor organs and all nervous organs. It is the effort at seeing that has produced the optic nerve and the physiological function of sight. The vision and visual organ of the eagle came by incessant looking for prey during thousands of years. Hence mind is not reflex or concomitant of nerve, but nerve is outgrowth of mind in the struggle of existence, and a psychological physiology is better than a physiological psychology.

The psychological field is then first, self; second, other selves or individuals. In this latter phase of human psychology we have the psychology of adults, then adolescent, senile, infantile, sexual, and racial psychology. In sub-human or comparative psychology we include animals, wild and tame, also all discussion on plant psychism, mind stuff (e.g. Clifford’s), etc. In superhuman psychology we include all doctrine of cosmic intelligence, teleology (vide Mind, x. 420).

We have limited ourselves to evolutionary psychology and that of the feelings, and our data are mostly from adult human consciousness. Evolutionary psychology bases itself on the idea that mental development originates and is continued through struggle or will effort. Such evidence as we can gather points to feeling, impelled exertion as the essence of psychic evolution, and it proves fruitful when assumed as a guiding principle. And the principle of struggle is final. We cannot admit with Bain a principle of spontaneity. The activities of a new-born lamb are seemingly spontaneous only because they are the results of energies stored in ages of psychic effort. This doctrine of struggle does away with all impressionism and all passivity theories. Mind is not a receptivity, an association of impressions, a reflex or concomitant of 377physiological activities, but it is dynamic determining vital fact, an active response to the conditions of self-existence. This impetus of struggle and striving seems to feed all life and make life, and has its place, perhaps the highest in the dynamic whole we term the universe. While the significance of struggle is a question for philosophy, yet, as matter of fact, it is the only method of realization we know; and the office of humanity is the providing a wider and higher scope for struggle, the making new and independent life regions. Science and art, ethics and religion, which are at bottom only phases of emotionalism, are with utmost toil developed for themselves, and new emotions now arising and yet to arise will be cherished for their own sakes. Mind begins and continues long as the servant of the body, it ends by making the body its servant, the instrument of the spiritual life, the temple of the Holy Ghost; but all its evolution is through supreme effort. In the spiritual evolution he who loveth his life shall lose it, he whose struggle is in the primitive stage, namely, for material existence, loses thereby the real life, the life of the spirit.

It is possible, indeed, that we may over-estimate this salient fact of struggle, and certainly, in the present state of psychology, modesty is most commendable. We would be far from assuming that the horizon of our mind is the limit of the universe. However, assuming mind as a biological function continually evolving in the service of self-conservation and self-furtherance, our endeavour has been to point out the general trend of the evolution of feeling, and to analyze some of its more important features. The little exploration we have made suggests the greatness of the unexplored field of mind, the vast number of psychoses unknown, and perhaps unknowable. The difficulties of the subjective method make it seem almost impossible to trace a complete history of mind. For mind to return over and realize its whole growth in all its ramifications 378seems quite as hard as to develop new forms, or a whole region of artificial psychosis. In the filling up of missing links, psychology presents vastly greater difficulties than biology because of its subjectivity of method and the evanescent nature of the facts. Further, the more I analyze consciousness, the more I am convinced of the great and often unexpected complexity of apparently simple forms, and I am satisfied then the simplicity and completeness of the system-making psychologists, physiological or idealistic, is factitious and delusive. An inductive science of mind is yet in its infancy. My conclusion that mind was at first, and is always as progressive, feeling-impelled will, and that sensing arose as secondary, as useful cognitive effort, is simply the best reading I can make from present data when assuming the current doctrine of evolution.

A very important point, which needs to be worked out more fully than we have been able to do, is as to the nature of revival as involving emotion. Sense of re-experience and of the experienceable is one of the most important acquisitions of mind. The self-consolidation and organization of experience certainly does not come in the first place by any mechanical association, but we must assume that all mental progress is the result of the most intense, though often blind and fortuitous striving. But just how the return of an experience is cognized as return and as experience, and so becoming basis for emotion, this is a most difficult inquiry on which we have made but a few remarks in the chapter on the nature of emotion. Just when and how sense of experience is generated, and what is a full analysis of its nature, must be postponed to some future study, but I am convinced that a very fruitful field for investigation lies in this direction. Experience certainly does at a very early stage become compound, become self-appreciative in some form, as sense of the potentiality of things, but the elucidation of progress in 379this line is confronted by many difficulties. The history of ideation or representation as a power for self-conservation has yet to be traced with definiteness and completeness.

Another point, which needs a far fuller discussion than we can now give, is as to the nature of organic interaction in consciousness, as to the real quality of psychic cause and effect. We have all along assumed feeling as stimulant of will, both the will to know and the will to act, but just how does feeling develop will as struggling effort? What is the exact mode of connection? We conceive readily of physical impact as determining effects in the material world, and we conceive a transference and transmutation of energy, but in the psychic realm we have no entities as permanent existences susceptible of entering into relation with other entities. How then does a pain incite a will activity? A peculiar form of consciousness we term will activity does directly follow upon feeling pain, and, within limits, the greater the pain, the greater the willing, but we have no theory to express the mode of connection of these consciousnesses. All that we can say is that one does follow upon the other as somehow caused by it. Yet it is certain that the limitation of conscious capacity must in every individual determine a definite range of interaction, and, beyond some particular point, the more I feel, the less I will, and vice versa. But the phenomenon of interference is likewise as obscure as that of excitation. The development of distinct organic forms of consciousness is slowly carried forward, and they exercise a definite dynamic relation to each other, though the mode is as yet wholly obscure. Thus the largest subdivisions of consciousness, knowing, feeling, and willing, become determined as distinct organically related modes, like the nervous, nutritive-circulatory and motor systems forming one organic whole body. These psychic modes attain gradually an intricate and definite development, whose 380constant interdependent connection with an individual body we term a “mind.” And we must remark that this vital relation of one consciousness and one form of consciousness to another is in no wise effected through apperception, through a third distinct consciousness, a cognitive one, which unites them in idea. A feeling excited a will act long before there was consciousness of either, or of their relation. In general we must say that consciousness does not consciously forge for itself its own relations, but that in by far the larger part of psychic development new modes of consciousness and their inter-relations come in a totally unforeseen way, by a blind striving in the struggle for existence. It may be doubted, indeed, if even the most advanced human mind can really invent a new consciousness or a new relation in consciousness, but by intense effort it attains them. One of the obscurest points in biology is as to the nature and cause of morphological variation, and the subject of mental variation is for psychological science far more obscure. We presuppose that mental variations somehow arise in response to sudden and great emergencies, and in connection with the severest effort. Mental progress is, in all the earlier life at least, only achieved under pressure of intense pain actually experienced or ideally so,—emotion—and in some way an appropriate and saving psychosis as response of organism to environment originates. This new form may be indistinct, and proceed as a gradual differentiation from previous types, still the method of action of the motive force seems mysterious. We can see, indeed, the advantage which accrues, for example, to the animal which is first able to detect danger or nutriment by scent, but just the method of the rise and progress of scenting as a conscious process seems difficult to trace. We cannot say that power of smell arose because orga............