In fine, then, the problem of human psychology is threefold: to analyse mental phenomena into their elements, to discover the laws of mental connection, and to work out in detail and under all its phases the correlation of mind with nervous system.
[§ 5]. The Method of Psychology.—Having learned what we have to do, let us ask what method we are to follow in doing it. So far as the nervous system is concerned, it is evident that the psychologist must take his cue from the physiologist; indeed, this part of his problem makes him, for the time being, a physiologist, only that his real interest remains centred in mind. But how is it when he is attacking the other parts of the problem? Is there a special psychological method, a peculiar way of working, that he must adopt in his study of mental phenomena? The answer is No: his method is that of science in general.
This method may be summed up in a single word as observation. All scientific description, all description that reflects a disinterested and impersonal search for fact, is got by way of observation. And observation implies three things: a certain attitude towards phenomena, a vivid experience of the particular phenomenon which is the object of observation, and an adequate report of this experience in words. The relation of these three things will be clear if we write a formula for observation, thus:
psychological (vivid experience → full report).
The adjective outside the bracket shows that we take up a psychological attitude to the world; in other words, that the world which we are exploring is (to use our catch-phrase again) the world with man left in. The adjective applies to the whole contents of the bracket; the experience which we are to have is mental experience, and our account of it is to be couched in psychological language. We are, then, ready for the experience; it comes, and we give it our best attention; we then express it in words; and we try to express it fully and adequately, in the words that it itself points to and requires. When the account has been written down, and so made available for other students, we have completed a psychological observation. When a number of such observations have been taken, we have the materials for a scientific description.
Observation is by no means easy; “there is not one person in a hundred,” said Huxley, “who can describe the commonest occurrence with even an approach to accuracy.” The reasons are partly of a technical nature; the use of scientific method is a bit of skilled labour, and skilled labour presupposes training; at first we are likely to be careless and clumsy; we do not see the need of scrupulous care, just because we do not know exactly what it is that we are doing. The great reason lies, however, in that difference between science and common sense to which we have already adverted; common sense interprets, and science describes. Malobservation is due, in the great majority of cases, to the ingrained tendency of the onlooker to interpret, to explain, what he observes. How many educated men and women to-day believe that the full moon dissipates the clouds? and how many more believe that changes of the moon coincide in some way with changes of the weather?
These remarks apply very definitely to psychology. The psychological observer needs technical training, first and foremost, because mental phenomena never stand still to be observed; mind is always in course, always going on; he must learn either to take rapid notes as the experience is passing, while he still remains alert to the new phases as they come, or he must register the experience phase by phase in memory, and reproduce it in words after it has passed. Nothing could well be more misleading, as a name for mental phenomena, than the familiar phrase ‘states of consciousness’; for a state is something relatively stable and permanent. Mental experiences are moving, proceeding, ongoing experiences; we might make up one of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau-words, and say that their essence is a processence. We shall henceforth speak of them as mental processes; only remember that they are not processes of something or in something, like the processes of decomposition and fermentation; they are experiences whose very nature is a proceeding, a course in time.
Secondly, the psychological observer is badly handicapped by common sense, which has long drawn a distinction between the method of psychology and the method of physics. Psychology is supposed to look within, to turn its eyes inward; physics is supposed to look out upon the objective world, and to keep its eyes in their normal position. The method of psychology is then an introspection or self-contemplation, a looking-in; and the method of the physical sciences is an inspection, a looking-at. The self which is thus introspected is, of course, judged and valued and approved and blamed; we know the ear-marks of common sense. So we find that the hero of yesterday’s novel “was not given to introspection. His external interests in life were too engrossing for him to think deeply or continuously about himself. Such a habit of mind he used vehemently to deprecate as morbid, egotistical. But now”—now the fateful girl is on the scene; the hero begins to think about himself; and flatters himself, poor man, that he is turning psychologist.
Unfortunately, neither a keen appreciation of his own virtue nor a rooted distrust of his own powers makes a man into a psychologist. Science turns its back upon the world of values. If, then, we are to keep the word introspection for the method of psychology, we must write the equations:
| introspection | = | psychological (vivid experience → full report) |
| inspection | = | physical (vivid experience → full report) |