What I have called the primitive method of psychological inquiry is also the obvious and natural one. It takes man as it finds him, accepts his mind for what it professes to be, and examines into its processes by introspection of a direct and simple kind. It is necessarily subject to the conditions that the object of study is also the medium through which the observations are made, and that there is no objective standard by which the accuracy of transmission through this medium can be estimated and corrected. In the result the materials collected are subjected to a very special and very stringent kind of censorship. If an observation is acceptable and satisfactory to the mind itself, it is reported as true; if it contains material which is unwelcome to the mind, it is reported as false; and in both cases the failure is in no sense due to any conscious dishonesty in the observing mind, but is a fallacy necessarily inherent in the method. A fairly characteristic product of inquiries of this type is the conception, which seems so obvious to common sense, that introspection does give access to all mental processes, so that a conscious motive must be discoverable for all the acts of the subject. Experience {69} with more objective methods has shown that when no motive is found for a given act or no motive consistent with the mind’s pretensions as to itself, there will always be a risk of a presentable one being extemporized. Psychology of this primitive type—the naïve psychology of common sense—is always necessarily tainted with what may be called in a special sense anthropomorphism; it tells us, that is to say, not what man is but what he thinks and feels himself to be. Judged by its fruits in enabling us to foretell or to influence conduct, it is worthless. It has been studied for thousands of years and infinite ingenuities have been expended on it, and yet at its best it can only tell us how the average man thinks his mind works—a body of information not sensibly superior in reality to the instructions of a constitutional monarch addressed to an unruly parliament. It has distracted thought with innumerable falsifications, but in all its secular cultivation has produced no body of generalizations of value in the practical conduct of life. COMMENTS ON AN OBJECTIVE SYSTEM OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY I