er
than a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is a
general reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elements
of experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what in
his way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketches
of human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a critical
philosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interested
in the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man;
his effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind's economy and
infusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligent
self-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind is
nobody's mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarily
imaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more than
in poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It is
given out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments or
persons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life have
impressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same world
they may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt his
interpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses will
not constitute a science of mental states, but rather--what is a far
greater thing--the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection in
general.

[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology.]

There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a
science, but not a science of matters of fact--I mean the dialectic of
ideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this
relation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies
further that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both.
Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into
a curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that
idea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and
relations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its
dialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all
those who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever
tends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however,
that those who resembled him most in amiability--say by flattering me no
less than he did--were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my
affections would become somewhat involved