mainly to the influence of Kant and the English neo-Kantians, this confusion occurs less often than formerly in logical and epistemological writings. But many psychologists—and most of all those whom we regard as the leaders of the 'new psychology' in America—seem to me to ignore the distinction between logic and psychology entirely. Professor Ladd, in his address as President of the American Psychological Association, seems to make psychology equivalent to the sum total of mental sciences. "It is not," he says, "in the last supreme and most difficult effort some account simply of the intensity and content and time-rate of sensations which psychological science has to render: it is rather of the faiths and fears and opinions and knowledges of mankind about things."[1]
Professor James's psychology is equally frank in identifying thought as 'significant,' with the mental processes as existing. "The first fact," he tells us, "for us, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on."[2] Furthermore, we are informed that the psychologist must necessarily become an 'Erkenntnisstheoretiker.' "The knowledge he criticises is the knowledge of particular men about the particular things that surround them. This he may, upon occasion, in the light of his own unquestionable knowledge, pronounce true or false, and trace the reasons by which it has become one or the other."[3] Another evidence of this identification is the constant use of Thought and Feeling as equivalent.[4]
Now this fusion of epistemology and psychology is both the strength and the weakness of one of the most important contentions of Professor James's psychology. "One of the two epoch-making features of that work," Professor Gordy tells us, "is its contention that all our so-called ideas at any one moment form one individual mental state."[5] And all readers of the work in question will be ready to acknowledge the important service which it has rendered to sound psychology by its attack upon the 'atomistic' position of the Associationists; and by its insistence upon the continuous nature of the complex fusion, in which psychical processes consist. But—so at least it seems to me—in his zeal against the Associationists, Professor James confuses the continuous nature of the concretely existing conscious processes with the functional unity of knowledge. This confusion, as Professor Ladd has already
