The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason.The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and void.On the one hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every external sensation, especially every intellectual work, - for if you were to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would become of internal observation? - on the other hand, after having with the utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must begin to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothing there takes place! Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions some day ridiculed upon the stage.The results of so strange a procedure harmonize entirely with its principle.For all the two thousand years during which metaphysicians have thus cultivated psychology, they are not agreed about one intelligible and established proposition.'Internal observation' gives almost as many divergent results as there are individuals who think they practise it."
Comte hardly could have known anything of the English, and nothing of the German, empirical psychology.The 'results' which he had in mind when writing were probably scholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, the faculties, the ego, the liberum arbitrium indifferentioe , etc.John Mill, in replying to him, says:
"It might have occurred to M.Comte that a fact may be studied through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our perceiving it, but the moment after : and this is really the mode in which our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired.We reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its impression in the memory is still fresh.Unless in one of these ways, we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to have, of what passes in our minds.
M.Comte would scarcely have affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations.We know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or by memory the moment after ; in either case, by direct knowledge, and not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism)
merely by their results.This simple fact destroys the whole of M.Comte's argument.Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe."
Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of practical truth about the matter.
Even the writers who insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it, a moment later.No one has emphasized more sharply than Brentano himself the difference between the immediate feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent reflective act.But which mode of consciousness of it is that which the psychologist must depend on? If to have feelings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones.But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and write about them, name them, classify and compare them and trace their relations to other things.Whilst alive they are their own property ; it is only post-mortem that they become his prey.
And as in the naming, classing, and know- ing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on the fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must be already past.No subjective state, whilst present, is its own object ; its object is always something else.There are, it is true, cases in which we appear to be naming our present feeling, and so to be experiencing and observing the same inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say 'I
feel tired,' 'I am angry,' etc.But these are illusory, and a little attention unmasks the illusion.The present conscious state, when I say 'I feel tired,'
is not the direct state of tire ; when I say "I feel angry,' it is not the direct state of anger.It is the state of saying-I-feel-tired , of saying-I-feel-angry , - entirely different matters, so different that the fatigue and anger apparently included in them are considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly felt in the previous instant.
The act of naming them has momentarily detracted from their force.
The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity of the introspective judgment might be maintained are empirical.If we had reason to think it has never yet deceived us, we might continue to trust it.This is the ground actually maintained by Herr Mohr.
"The illusions of our senses." says this author," have undermined our belief in the reality of the outer world ; but in the sphere of inner observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves to be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling.We have never been misled into thinking we were not in doubt or in anger when these conditions were really states of our consciousness."
