tach to these terms,
feeling, emotion, will, desire, pleasure, displeasure, joy, and pain,
is essentially different from that which controls the causal
explanations of scientific psychology. We cannot enter into the real
fundamental questions here, which are too often carelessly ignored
even in scientific quarters. Too often psychology is treated, even by
psychologists, as if it covered every possible systematic treatment of
inner experience, and correspondingly outsiders like the economists
fancy that they are on psychological ground and are handling
psychological conceptions as soon as they make any statements
concerning the inner life. But if we examine the real purposes and
presuppositions of the various sciences, we must recognize that the
human experience can be looked on from two entirely different points
of view. Only from one of the two does it present itself as
psychological material and as a fit object for psychological study.
From the other point of view, which is no less valuable and no less
important for the understanding of our inner life, human experience
offers itself as a reality with which psychology as such has nothing
to do, even though it may be difficult to eliminate the usual
psychological words.

The psychologist considers human experience as a series of objects for
consciousness. All the perceptions and memory ideas and imaginative
ideas and feelings and emotions, are taken by him as mental objects of
which consciousness becomes aware, and his task is to describe and to
explain them and to find the laws for their succession. He studies
them as a naturalist studies the chemical elements or the stars. It
makes no difference whether his explanation leads him to connect these
mental contents with brain processes as one theory proposes, or with
subconscious processes as another theory suggests. The entirely
different aspect of inner life is the one which is most natural in our
ordinary intercourse. Whenever we give an account of our inner life or
are interested in the experience of our friends, we do not consider
how their mental experiences as such objective contents of
consciousness are to be described and explained, but we take them as
inner actions and attitudes toward the world, and our aim is not to
describe and to explain them but to interpret and to understand them.
We do not seek their elements but their meaning, we do not seek their
causes and effects but their inner relations and their i