Handbook of psychology Author:James Mark Baldwin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: seems necessary to give unity to the phenomena under investigation and afford a point of departure. We shall find in considering method that it is necessary ther... more »e.1 As the investigation proceeds, its results give greater definiteness to this assumption and prepare the way for rational psychology. And second, it is necessary to assume that mental phenomena are subject to law. If this were not true there could be no such science. There could be no induction in mental states without the law of mental uniformity. Like all the other sciences, also, psychology must hand in its results to higher thinking for the construction of a developed world-theory.' Definition of Psychology. We may, accordingly, define psychology as the science of the phenomena of consciousness, being careful to include consciousness where- ever and in whatever stages it be found; or, if we emphasize, not so much the facts with which we deal, as the mode of our knowledge of these facts, and its entire separateness from abstract theory, as the science of mind as we know it. ยง 2. Difficulties And Errors In Psychology. It has already been said that consciousness is the one characteristic of what we denominate mental. The difficulties and errors, therefore, that arise in psycholog)' must be difficulties and errors either in the reports or in the interpretation of consciousness. There can be no doubt that there are such difficulties and errors, for otherwise the science would long ago have been completed. They cannot arise in the actual reports of consciousness, for by its intimate nature as immediate knowledge of inner states it reveals what actually is and happens. The question of the veracity of consciousness, as discussed by Hamilton, is the question as to whether the real state in consciousness corresponds ...« less