interpreted by it when the proper time arrives. Such a provisional body of propositions about states of mind, and about the cognitions which they enjoy, is what I mean by Psychology considered as a natural science. On any ulterior theory of matter, mind, and knowledge, the facts and laws of Psychology thus understood will have their value. If critics find that this natural-science point of view cuts things too arbitrarily short, they must not blame the book which confines itself to that point of view; rather must they go on themselves to complete it by their deeper thought. Incomplete statements are often practically necessary. To go beyond the usual scientific' assumptions in the present case, would require, not a volume, but a shelfful of volumes, and by the present author such a shelfful could not be written at all. Let it also be added that the human mind is all that can be touched upon in this book. Although the mental life of lower creatures has been examined into of late years with some success, we have no space for its consideration here, and can only allude to its manifestations incidentally when they throw light upon our own. Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, reasoning, willing, etc., were explained, almost without reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer insight of modern days. perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst. Not only are our capacities for forming new habits, for remembering sequences, and for abstracting general properties from things and associating their usual consequences with them, exactly the faculties needed for steering us in this world of mixed variety and uniformity, but our emo tions and instincts are adapted to very special features of that world. In the main, if a phenomenon is important for our welfare, it interests and excites us the first time we come into its presence. Dangerous things fill us with inyoluntary fear; poisonous things with distaste; indispensable things with appetite. Mind and world in short have been evolved together, and in consequence are something of a mutual fit. The special interactions between the outer order and the order of consciousness, by which this harmony, such as it is, may in the course of time have come about, have been made the subject of many evolutionary speculations, which, though they cannot so far be said to be conclusive, have at least refreshed and enriched the whole subject, and brought all sorts of new questions to the light. The chief result of all this more modern view is the gradually growing conviction that mental life is primarily teleological; that is to say, that our various ways of feeling and thinking have grown to be what they are because of their utility in shaping our reactions on the outer world. On the whole, few recent formulas have done more service in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjust- ment of inner to outer relations.' The adjustment is to immediately present objects in lower animals and in infants. It is to objects more and more remote in time and space, and inferred by means of more and more complex and exact processes of reasoning, when the grade of mental development grows more advanced. Primarily then, and fundamentally, the mental life is for the sake of action of a preservative sort. Secondarily and incidentally it does many other things, and may even, when ill adapted,' lead to its possessor's destruction. Psychology, taken in the widest way, ought to study every sort of mental activity, the useless and harmful sorts as well as that which is 'adapted.' But the study of the harmful in mental life has been made the subject of a special branch called 'Psychiatry'-the science of insanity—and the study of the useless is made over to 'Esthetics.' Esthetics and Psychiatry will receive no special notice in this book. All mental states (no matter what their character as regards utility may be) are followed by bodily activity of some sort. They lead to inconspicuous changes in breathing, circulation, general muscular tension, and glandular or other visceral activity, even if they do not lead to conspicuous movements of the muscles of voluntary life. Not only certain particular states of mind, then (such as those called volitions, for example), but states of mind as such, all states of mind, even mere thoughts and feelings, are motor in their consequences. This will be made manifest. in detail as our study advances. Meanwhile let it be set down as one of the fundamental facts of the science with which we are engaged. It was said above that the 'conditions' of states of consciousness must be studied. The immediate condition of a state of consciousness is an activity of some sort in the cerebral hemispheres. This proposition is supported by so many pathological facts, and laid by physiologists at the base of so many of their reasonings, that to the medically educated mind it seems almost axiomatic. It would be hard, however, to give any short and peremptory proof of the unconditional dependence of mental action upon neural change. That a general and usual amount of dependence exists cannot possibly be ignored. One has only to consider how quickly consciousness may be (so far as we know) abolished by a blow on the head, by rapid loss of blood, by an epileptic discharge, by a full dose of alcohol, opium, ether, or nitrous oxide-or how easily it may be altered in quality by a smaller dose of any of these agents or of others, or by a fever,—to see how at the mercy of bodily happenings our spirit is. A little stoppage of the gall-duct, a swallow of cathartic medicine, a cup of strong coffee at the proper moment, will entirely overturn for the time a man's views of life. Our moods and resolutions are more determined by the condition of our circulation than by our logical grounds. Whether a man shall be a hero or a coward is a matter of his temporary 'nerves.' In many kinds of insanity, though by no means in all, distinct alterations of the brain-tissue have been found. Destruction of certain definite portions of the cerebral hemispheres involves losses of memory and of acquired motor faculty of quite determinate sorts, to which we shall revert again under the title of aphasias. Taking all such facts together, the simple and radical conception dawns upon the mind that mental action may be uniformly and absolutely a function of brain-action, varying as the latter varies, and being to the brain-action as effect to cause. This conception is the 'working hypothesis' which underlies all the 'physiological psychology' of recent years, and it will be the working hypothesis of this book. Taken thus absolutely, it may possibly be too sweeping a statement of what in reality is only a partial truth. But the only way to make sure of its unsatisfactoriness is to apply it seriously to every possible case that can turn up. To work an hypothesis for all it is worth' is the real, and often the only, way to prove its insufficiency. I shall therefore assume without scruple at the outset that the uniform correlation of brain-states with mind-states is a law of nature. The interpretation of the law in detail will best show where its facilities and where its difficulties lie. To some readers such an assumption will seem like the most unjustifiable a priori materialism. In one sense it doubtless is materialism: it puts the Higher at the mercy of the Lower. But although we affirm that the coming to pass of thought is a consequence of mechanical laws,-for, according to another working hypothesis,' that namely of physiology, the laws of brain-action are at bottom mechanical laws,— we do not in the least explain the nature of thought by affirming this dependence, and in that latter sense our proposition is not materialism. The authors who most unconditionally affirm the dependence of our thoughts on our brain to be a fact are often the loudest to insist that the fact is inexplicable, and that the intimate essence of consciousness can never be rationally accounted for by any material cause. It will doubtless take several generations of psychologists to test the hypothesis of dependence with anything like minuteness. The books which postulate it will be to some extent on conjectural ground. But the student will remember that the Sciences constantly have to take these risks, and habitually advance by zigzagging from one absolute formula to another which corrects it by going too far the other way. At present Psychology is on the materialistic tack, and ought in the interests of ultimate success to be allowed full headway even by those who are certain she will never fetch the port without putting down the helm once more. The only thing that is perfectly certain is that when taken up into the total body of Philosophy, the formulas of Psychology will appear with a very different meaning from that which they suggest so long as they are studied from the point of view of an abstract and truncated natural science,' however practically necessary and indispensable their study from such a provisional point of view may be. The Divisions of Psychology. So far as possible, then, we are to study states of consciousness in correlation with their probable neural conditions. Now the nervous system is well understood to-day to be nothing but a machine for receiving impressions and discharging reactions preservative to the individual and his kind-so much of physiology the reader will surely know. Anatomically, therefore, the nervous system falls into three main divisions, comprising 1) The fibres which carry currents in; 2) The organs of central redirection of them; and Functionally, we have sensation, central reflection, and motion, to correspond to these anatomical divisions. In Psychology we may divide our work according to a similar |