in reflection, or interior observation. Assuredly, no one believes more firmly than we do in the necessity of this mode of observation; it is the point of departure, the indispensable condition of all psychology, and those who have denied it, like Broussais and Aug. Comte, have so completely gone against evidence, and given the game to their adversaries, that their most faithful disciples have not gone so far with them. It is certain that the anatomist and the physiologist might pass centuries in studying the brain and the nerves, without ever suspecting what a pleasure or a pain is, if they have not felt both.

No testimony is so valuable on this point as that of consciousness, and we are always brought back to that saying of an anatomist, In the presence of the fibres of the brain, we are like hackney coachmen, who know the streets and the houses, but know nothing of what takes place inside them.' It is also certain that the objections made to this method of observation have been very well discussed. But is it true that interior observation is the unique method of psychology? that it reveals everything, that it suffices for everything? Taken in its rigorous meaning, this doctrine would lead to the impossibility of the science. For, if my reflection apprises me of that which passes in me, it is absolutely incapable of enabling me to penetrate into the mind. of another. A more complicated process is necessary for that. We are talking; a man present at our conversation joins in it with an absent manner, says a few words with evident effort, and forces a smile; I conclude from all this that he is a prey to some hidden trouble. I may soon divine its causes if I have a penetrating mind, and if I am acquainted with this man and his antecedents. But this psychological discovery is a very complex operation, of which the following are the stages: perception of signs and gestures, interpretation of those signs, induction from effects to causes, inference, reasoning by analogy. It has nothing in common with interior observation except that aptitude for knowing others better which comes from knowing one's-self better. Thus, one of two things is the case: either psychology is limited to interior observations, and these being completely individual, it has no longer any scientific character; or else it is extended to other men, it searches out laws, it practises induction, it reasons,

and then it is susceptible of progress; but its method is to a great extent objective. Interior observation alone is not sufficient for the weakest psychology.

Another defect of the ordinary method is, that it has led, as might have been foreseen, to abstraction. It has led philosophers to study the phenomena of mind rather as logicians than as psychologists, rather as reasoners than as observers. One of its chief consequences has been the current doctrine of faculties.

It may be said, in many respects to be useful, to be necessary. Psychology has facts to classify, like physics or botany; it separates those which are different, it unites those which are like, and thus it forms groups; to each group it assigns a name, which, like the terms heat, light, magnetism, designates the unknown causes of known phenomena. But the almost inevitable danger of this method is to personify causes, to erect them into distinct and independent entities; we forget that these are only abstracts, convenient formulas for the explanation of the science, which have no value unless they are referred back to the concretes whence they have been taken, that therein consists all their value, all their reality. The history of ancient physics, embarrassed by substantial forms and occult causes, shows us how the clearest minds yield to the temptation to realize abstractions. Hence, in psychology, we have a first result, which consists in the substitution of a verbal study, that of faculties, for a real study, that of phenomena. Discussions on free-will might well be of that nature, the problem being perhaps inextricable only because it is ill stated. Thus the time which might be devoted to observation is lost in idle disputes, and in place of impartial observers, parties are formed, who push their hypotheses to extremes, and who are perpetually contending for chimeras, because phantoms can neither be killed nor imprisoned. A third result is to dissimulate the unity of composition of psychological phenomena. Mental life has its degrees, and, so to speak, its stages; they are only separated by vague limits made out by the doctrine of faculties to be fixed and absolute. Ad. Garnier says very justly that in order to attribute facts to diverse causes, it is necessary that the facts should be not only different, but independent of phenomena, not only very different from, but even opposed to, each

other, as the ascent of gases to the fall of bodies; yet capable of having an identical cause. But we look in vain for this character of independence in psychological phenomena; we find them confounded, mixed up together, and reciprocally supposing each other. One of the philosophers of whom we propose to speak in this volume, Mr. Samuel Bailey, has acutely criticised the mixed phraseology which is inherent in the method by which faculties are erected into entities, distinct from man himself:-' The faculties have been represented acting like independent agents, giving birth to ideas, passing them on to each other mutually, and transacting their business among themselves. In this kind of phraseology the mind often appears like a sort of field, in which perception, reason, memory, imagination, will, conscience, the passions, produce their operations, like so many powers, either allied or hostile. Sometimes one of these faculties has the supremacy and the others are subordinate; one usurps the authority and the other yields, one explains and the others listen, one deceives and the other is deceived. Meantime the mind, or the intelligent being himself, is completely lost to view in the midst of these transactions, in which he does not appear to have any part. At other times we are shown these faculties treating with their proprietor or master, lending him their services, acting under his control, or his direction, furnishing him with evidence, instructing him, enlightening him by their revelations, as if he himself were detached and apart from the faculties which it is said he possesses, commands, and hearkens to.' The same remarks may be made upon the senses; the organs of the senses are no doubt distinct from the mind, but the senses themselves are not so. When a man sees or hears, it is he, it is the conscious being, who sees or hears. To say that the senses see and hear is to make entities of them, whereas in reality there are simply certain mental affections produced.

Hobbes, Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, have more than once criticised this inexact language without however succeeding in avoiding it themselves. Bailey quotes numerous examples, among which Kant would be the most flagrant, if M. Cousin had not written. According to German philosophy, the major of a syllogism refers to the understanding, the minor to the judgment, the conclusion

to reason. 'Thus,' says Bailey,' the intelligent being, like a constitutional monarch, governs regularly by means of his ministers; the Understanding being the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Faculty of Judging being the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and the Reason the First Lord of the Treasury.'

Is it always possible to avoid these expressions? No. 'And,' continues Bailey, 'I have no more objection to make to the employment of the term "faculties" on ordinary occasions than to the habit which one of my friends has of measuring distances with sufficient exactness by the number of his own strides. But the methodical "investigation" of the facts of consciousness demands as much exactness and precision as any researches into physics or mathematics; and the method of “faculties resembles that no more closely than my friend's calculation resembles a carefully drawn up trigonometrical plan.'1

It would be no more reasonable to abandon the use of such terms as will, reason, memory, etc., than to cease to use the words much, little, some. But what would we think of a statistician who, instead of saying that in such and such a country each marriage produces on an average four children, and that three-fifths of the population know how to read and write, should content himself with announcing that these marriages produce some children, and that the people who can read and write are numerous. The quantitative determination is the important matter. A criticism of 'imaginary operations,' almost entirely at the expense of M. Cousin, leads the author to conclude, that 'the predominance of those imaginary facts in metaphysical (psychological) works shows that humanity in point of mental philosophy has arrived at the period at which, in physics, people talked of the transmutation of metals, the elixir of life, the abhorrence of a vacuum by nature, and other similar things.' 2

1 Bailey's Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. i. Letter 3. 2 Ibid. Letter 5.

VII.

Psychology, understood in its ordinary sense, is then a study more occupied with abstractions than with facts, founded upon a subjective method, and full of metaphysical discussions. Let us now see what psychology might be, conceived of as an independent science.

We have seen that in every order of knowledge, when the number of facts and accumulated observations is tolerably large, there comes, by the very nature of things, a tendency to anatomy, and that the new science, leaving to metaphysics the care of discussing the first principles, constitutes itself on its own basis, sufficiently solid for its purpose, though often utterly insecure to those who examine it in the light of philosophy.

In a word, the conditions of independence are simply the constant study of facts and separation from metaphysics.

Are there enough materials yet accumulated to constitute an experimental psychology? They are so numerous that no one has yet been found to classify them, to set them in order, and to reduce them to a system. The progress of physical and natural sciences, of linguistics, and of history, has reached unexpected facts, suggested novel appreciations, at least to those who have no taste for a stagnant and scholastic psychology, studies on the mechanism of the sensations, on the conditions of memory, on the effects of the imagination and the association of ideas, on dreams, somnambulism, ecstasy, hallucination, madness, and idiocy, researches hitherto unknown into the relation between the physical and the moral, a new conception of moral (psychological) nature, of humanity, resulting from a profounder study of history and of races, languages serving, as it were, for a petrified psychology.

An effort has been made of late to subject psychological acts to the precise control of measure. That is, in two words, what we find in thousands of books, memoirs, observations, or experiences; an immense mass of facts which still awaits its Kepler or its Newton. Let us now bring these experimental data into connexion with the little which antiquity has left us on this subject (Aristotle: Treatise on the Soul, Sensation, Memory, Sleep, etc.). Then let us bring the ontological psychology of our time into con