, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the
natural crises that subtend them.

This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts
themselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even
when the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its
meaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a
roundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is
superfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger:
hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its
extreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want
of nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise
with higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in
doubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say,
square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or
steal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it
also says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of
the land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence,
clearly enough declares what it springs from--a social tradition; and
what it represents--the interests, real or imaginary, of the community
in which you were reared.

Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its
method are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly,
or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a
man's character or a river's god. Particulars in illustration may have
good historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such
metaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to
continue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods;
and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may
continue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.

[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]

When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying
consciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling
or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a
psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of
reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to
be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous
discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction tha