to the changes of perspective furnished by visible objects.
It would be more exact to say that psychology specially studies certain objects of cognition, such as those which have the character of representations (reminiscences, ideas, concepts), the emotions, the volitions, and the reciprocal influences of these objects among themselves. It studies, then, a part of the material world, of that world which till now has been called psychological, because it does not come under the senses, and because it is subjective and inaccessible to others than ourselves; it studies the laws of those objects, which laws have been termed mental.[1]
These laws are not recognised, popularly speaking, either in physics or in biology; they constitute for us a cognition apart from that of the natural world. Association by resemblance, for example, is a law of consciousness; it is a psychological law which has no application nor counterpart in the world of physics or biology. We may therefore sum up what has been said by the statement that
- ↑ I am compelled, much against my will, to use throughout this passage an equivocal expression, that of “mental law,” or law of consciousness, or psychological law. I indicate by this the laws of contiguity and of similarity; as they result from the properties of the images, and as these are of a material nature, they are really physical and material laws like those of external nature. But how can all these laws be called physical laws without running the risk of confusing them one with the other?
