But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them they are sure to combine.New ground will from year to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow.Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the face of the science so far as the latter is a record of mere work done.
The comparative method , finally, supplements the intro-
spective and experimental methods.This method presupposes a normal psychology of introspection to be established in its main features.But where the origin of these features, or their dependence upon one another, is in question, it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenomenon considered through all its possible variations of type and combination.So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own ; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life.The history of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental product, are pressed into the same service.
Messrs.Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those supposed able to reply.The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such circulars be not ranked among the common pests of life.Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge.There are great sources of error in the comparative method.The interpretation of the 'psychoses' of animals, savages, and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the personal equation of the investigator has things very much its own way.A savage will be reported to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the observer unduly.A child will be assumed without self-consciousness because he talks of himself in the third person, etc., etc.No rules can be laid down in advance.Comparative observations, to be definite, must usually be made to test some pre-existing hypothesis ; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be as candid as you can.THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY.The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of Speech.
Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward things.
The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope,
and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words.The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red, blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in both an objective and a subjective sense.They stand for outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse.But the objective sense is the original sense ; and still to-day we have to describe a large number of sensations by the name of the object from which they have most frequently been got.An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesy taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall what I mean.This absence of a special vocabulary for subjective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest of them.Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizing one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the mind.Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name.But the lack of a word quite as often leads to the directly opposite error.We are then prone to suppose that no entity can be there ; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly recognized in speech. It is hard to focus our attention on the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in the descriptive parts of most psychologies.
But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the dependence of psychology on common speech.Naming our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so the thought must be.The thought of several distinct things can only consist of several distinct bits of thought, or 'ideas ;' that of an abstract or universal object can only be an abstract or universal idea. As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a precisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility.The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded as the identity of its recurrent thought ; and the perceptions of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally conceived to be brought about only through a multiplicity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions.The continuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is preached, for the existence of which no good introspective grounds can be brought forward, and out of which presently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the heritage of woe of students of the mind.
