INTROSPECTIVE METHOD. 79 Introspective Method. of other people in the same way that you can your own? Try it. You often wish to know whether your pupils are attending to you, or whether they understand you. Can you find out, in the same way, that you know whether or not you are attending? Plainly not. You know that you are attending simply by looking into your own mind, and you can not look into the mind of any one else. The word which means looking into is "introspection"; and the adjective "introspective" seems, therefore, to describe best the way or mode or method in which you study your own mind. But you can not learn anything about the minds of other people in that way. When you study other people, you notice their looks and actions. Many teachers think they can tell whether their pupils are attending to them without asking questions. They look or act as though they were attending, and so the teachers who believe this conclude they are. Conclude, I say. Note the word. It denotes a process of reasoning. And when we study the minds of others, we have to do it by processes of reasoning by acts of inference. But can you study the minds Inferential Method. You do not even know that there is any one in the world besides yourself except by a process of reasoning. When you say you see a man, the truth is that you have sensations of color, and from this fact infer the presence of a human being like yourself. When you see this human being laugh, you infer that he is amused, just as you are conscious of being amused when you laugh. All that you learn of any human being you learn by reasoning- by inference. As, then, we call the method of studying our own minds the introspective – since we study them by looking directly within-so we may call the method of studying the minds of others the inferential, since we do it by processes of inference. The Inferential Method and the Study of History. Whatever you learn about the minds of others- whether you learn it from what you see them do, or what you read about them-you learn by means of the inferential method. When you learn how Washington exposed himself when Braddock's army was routed, and at the battle of Princeton, you infer that he was brave, precisely as you would have done if you had seen him. Since all the facts of human history relate to the actions of men, they are materials which the inferential method uses to increase our knowledge of human nature. When we learn, for example, that the ancient Greeks left their weak children exposed, in order that they might die, the inferential method enables us to see that Greek fathers and mothers did not love their children as fathers and mothers love their children now, and that they probably loved their country more, since a weak child was considered of no worth because it gave no promise of being able to be of service to the State. When we know that Aristotle said that all that was necessary to reform or relax the manners of a people was to add one string to the lyre or take one from it, the same method enables us to see that the Greeks had a susceptibility to music of which we can scarcely have any idea to-day. When we know that "those doughty old mediæval knights despised the petty clerk's trick of writing, because, compared to a life of toilsome and heroic action, it seemed to them slavish and unmanly," we know that they looked upon a very different world from ours INFERENTIAL METHOD AND MIND STUDY. 81 a world of different aims and ideals; that the knowledge we prize so highly, and toil so painfully to gain, was a thing of no value in their eyes. The inferential method even uses the relics of the prehistoric ages to add to our knowledge of men. It takes the rough tools of the cave-dwellers and forces from them a little knowledge of the strange men who used them. Inferential Method and the Study of our own Minds. – I have said that the introspective method is the method we use in studying our own mental facts. That needs qualification. It is possible for us to study our own minds by means of the inferential method. People often forget their motives for their actions. They say: "I do not know how I came to do that." In such cases they can learn their motives only by means of the inferential method, precisely as though they were other people whose actions they were considering, and which they were trying to account for. It is doubtless true, as we shall see in a later chapter, that in many cases there is no reason in the sense of conscious motive. Some idea suggested the action, and the action was straightway performed in the entire absence of anything that can be called reasoning. Further, the introspective method can only give us individual facts. As the bodily eye only sees isolated objects, and can not connect them by laws, so the eye of the mind only sees isolated mental facts, and can not connect them together by laws. In other words, we observe facts — not laws. Laws are the result of inference never of direct obser vation. the The introspective and inferential methods, then two methods of studying mind evidently sustain a close relation to each other. You can, indeed, use the introspective method without the inferential, in the mere collection of facts; but you can not use the inferential at all without the introspective. When you infer that people have such and such mental facts under such and such circumstances, it is because you know by introspection that you have the same mental facts under the same circumstances. The laughter and tears of others would have no meaning to you if you had never known amusement or sorrow. - Difficulties of the Inferential Method. Each of these methods has its peculiar difficulties. The results reached by means of the inferential method are always more or less uncertain. If you have ever made a thorough study of the history of any great man, you have doubtless had an excellent illustration of this. While different historians generally agree substantially as to the actions of men, they differ very widely in their interpretations of those actions. Federalist historians, and those who sympathize with them, usually regard Jefferson, for example, as a demagogue, while Democratic historians regard him as an exalted and devoted patriot. The reason of course is that, using the inferential method, the one explained his actions by one set of mental facts, the other by another. Illustration. A passage in John Fiske's The Beginnings of New England gives such an excellent illustration of the inferential method and its difficulties that it deserves to be quoted at length: "It is difficult for the civilized man and the savage to understand each other. As a rule, the one does not know DIFFICULTIES OF INTROSPECTIVE METHOD. 83 what the other is thinking about." And then, speaking of Eliot, and what the Indians thought about him, the author goes on "His design in founding his villages of Christian Indians was in the highest degree benevolent and noble, but the heathen Indians could hardly be expected to see anything in it but a cunning scheme for destroying them. Eliot's converts were for the most part from the Massachusetts tribe, the smallest and weakest of all. The Plymouth converts came chiefly from the tribe next in weakness- the Pokanokets, or Wampanoags. The more powerful tribes - Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Mohegans -furnished very few converts. When they saw the white intruders gathering members of the weakest tribes into villages of English type, and teaching them strange gods while clothing them in strange garments, they probably supposed that the pale-faces were simply adopting these Indians into their white tribe as a means of increasing their military strength. At any rate, such a proceeding would be perfectly intelligible to the savage mind, whereas the nature of Eliot's design lay quite beyond its ken. As the Indians recovered from their supernatural dread of the English, and began to regard them as using human means to accomplish their ends, they must, of course, interpret their conduct in such light as savage experience could afford. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a savage tribe to absorb weak neighbors by adoption, and thus increase its force preparatory to a deadly assault upon other neighbors." Difficulties of the Introspective Method. The great difficulty with the introspective method is that a mental fact vanishes as soon as you begin to examine it introspec |