THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY

Until the year 1890, when James’s Principles were published, the psychology of Hume reigned absolutely in philosophy.[A] All empiricists accepted it enthusiastically, as the sum of philosophic wisdom; all apriorists submitted to it, even in supplementing and modifying it by ‘transcendental’ and metaphysical additions; in either case it remained uncontested as psychology, and, by propounding an utterly erroneous analysis of the mind and its experience, entangled philosophy in inextricable difficulties.

Hume had, as philosophers commonly do, set out from the practically sufficient analysis of experience which all find ready-made in language.  He accepted, therefore, from common sense the belief that physical reality is composed of a multitude of separate existences that act on one another, and tried to conceive mental life strictly on the same analogy.  His theory of experience, therefore, closely parallels the atomistic theory of matter.  Just as the physicist explains bodies as collections of discrete particles, so Hume reduced all the contents of the mind to a number of elementary sensations.  Whether the mind was reflecting on its own internal ideas, or whether it was undergoing impressions which it supposed to come from an external source, all that was really happening was a succession of detached sensations.  It seemed to Hume indisputable that every distinct perception (or ‘impression’) was a distinct existence, and that all ‘ideas’ were equally distinct, though fainter, copies of impressions.  Beyond impressions and ideas it was unnecessary to look.  Thus to look at a chessboard was to have a number of sensations of black and white arranged in a certain order, to listen to a piece of music was to experience a succession of loud and soft auditory sensations, to handle a stone was to receive a group of sensations of touch.  To suppose that anything beyond these sensory units was ever really experienced was futile fiction.  Experience was a mosaic, of which the stones were the detached sensations, and their washed-out copies, the ideas.

If this analysis of the mind were correct—­and its correctness was not disputed for more than a hundred years, for were not the sensations admitted to be the ultimate analysis of all that was perceived?—­the common-sense belief that knowledge revealed a world outside the thinker was, of course, erroneous.  For common sense could hardly treat ‘things’ as merely ‘sensations’ artificially grouped together in space, each ‘thing’ being a complex of a number of sensations having relation to similar complexes.  It held rather that the successive appearances of things were related in time, in such a way that they could be supposed to reveal a single object able to endure in spite of surface changes, and to manifest the identity of its sensory ‘qualities.’  Similarly, the succession of ideas within the mind was for it supported by the inward unity of the soul within which they arose.  Moreover, Hume’s analysis made havoc of all idea, of ‘causation.’  If every sensation was a separate being, how was it to be connected with any other in any regular or necessary connection?  Two events related as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ must be a myth.