most too complicated to be
ascertained. It may be compared to an irregular building, run up hastily
and not likely to last, because its foundations are weak, and in many
places rest only on the surface of the ground. It has sought rather to
put together scattered observations and to make them into a system than
to describe or prove them. It has never severely drawn the line between
facts and opinions. It has substituted a technical phraseology for the
common use of language, being neither able to win acceptance for the one
nor to get rid of the other.

The system which has thus arisen appears to be a kind of metaphysic
narrowed to the point of view of the individual mind, through which, as
through some new optical instrument limiting the sphere of vision, the
interior of thought and sensation is examined. But the individual mind
in the abstract, as distinct from the mind of a particular individual
and separated from the environment of circumstances, is a fiction only.
Yet facts which are partly true gather around this fiction and are
naturally described by the help of it. There is also a common type of
the mind which is derived from the comparison of many minds with one
another and with our own. The phenomena of which Psychology treats are
familiar to us, but they are for the most part indefinite; they relate
to a something inside the body, which seems also to overleap the limits
of space. The operations of this something, when isolated, cannot be
analyzed by us or subjected to observation and experiment. And there is
another point to be considered. The mind, when thinking, cannot
survey that part of itself which is used in thought. It can only
be contemplated in the past, that is to say, in the history of the
individual or of the world. This is the scientific method of studying
the mind. But Psychology has also some other supports, specious rather
than real. It is partly sustained by the false analogy of Physical
Science and has great expectations from its near relationship to
Physiology. We truly remark that there is an infinite complexity of
the body corresponding to the infinite subtlety of the mind; we are
conscious that they are very nearly connected. But in endeavouring to
trace the nature of the connexion we are baffled and disappointed. In
our knowledge of them the gulf remains the same: no microscope has ever
seen into thought; no reflection on ourselves has supplied the missing
link between mind and matter...