nd unseizableness in the facts; yet a
beginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situations
has been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writers
sometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratories
from the lips of "subjects." What a man under special conditions may say
he feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; and
were these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possible
to enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany every
state of body and every social situation.

[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.]

This advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistry
which distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attention
is there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situation
which gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of these
imagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even be
thought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said to
have two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and an
incidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mental
facts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive or
spiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme.
This battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with their
own cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than an
idealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms and
realisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and are
made to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world's matter.

[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic.]

Phenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomena
and ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension,
besides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the person
who perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in being
reported to perception, turns the report into a mental fact
distinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partly
understood and the natural world has become a constant presence, the
whole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mental
flux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from the
elements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. The
primitive phenomena are now called m