sk myself what processes are going on in his mind, what are the
real contents of his consciousness, that is, what perceptions and memory
pictures and imaginative ideas and feelings and emotions and judgments
and volitions are really present in his consciousness. I watch him to
find out, I observe his mental states, I do not ask whether I agree or
disagree; his will is for me now not something which has a meaning, but
simply something which occurs in his inner experience; his ideas now
have for me no reference to something in the world, but they are simply
contents of his consciousness; his memories now are for me not symbols
of a past to which he refers, but they are present pictures in his mind;
in short, what I now find is not a self which shows itself in its aims
and purposes and attitudes, but a complex content of consciousness which
is composed of numberless elements. I might say in the first place that
my friend was to me a subject whom I tried to understand by interpreting
his meaning, and in the second case, an object which I understand by
describing its structure, its elements, and their connections.

Both ways of looking on man are constantly needed. We might alternate
between them in any experience. In the heat of argument, my friend will
certainly be for me the subject with whose meanings I try to agree or
disagree, whose emotions carry me away, whose ideas open the world to
me. Yet in the next moment, I may notice that his ideas were shaped and
determined by certain earlier experiences; that they linked themselves
in memory according to certain laws of mental flow; that the vividness
of his ideas made him overlook certain impressions of the surroundings;
and that may turn my attention to an entirely different aspect of his
inner life. His feelings and emotions, his volitions and judgments now
have for me simply the character of processes which go on and which are
observed, which coincide and which succeed each other, which fuse and
overlap, and which are composed of smaller parts. My interest is now no
longer in the meaning and intentions of this self, but it belongs to the
structure and the connections in this system of mental facts. At first,
I wanted to understand him by living with him, by participating in his
attitudes, and by feeling with his will; now I want to understand him by
examining all the processes which go on in his consciousness, by
studying their make-up and their behavior, their elements an