[193] Wundt says: "The first rule for utilizing inward observation consists in taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unexpected, and not intentionally brought about.... _First_ it is best as far as possible to rely on _Memory_ and not on immediate Apprehension.... _Second_, internal observation is better fitted to grasp clearly conscious states, especially voluntary mental acts: such inner processes as are obscurely conscious and involuntary will almost entirely elude it, because the effort to observe interferes with them, and because they seldom abide in memory." (Logik, ii, 432.) [194] In cases like this, where the state outlasts the act of naming it, exists before it, and recurs when it is past, we probably run little practical risk of error when we talk as if the state knew itself. The state of feeling and the state of naming the feeling are continuous, and the infallibility of such prompt introspective judgments is probably great. But even here the certainty of our knowledge ought not to be argued on the _a priori_ ground that _percipi_ and _esse_ are in psychology the same. The states are really two; the naming state and the named state are apart; '_percipi_ is _esse_' is not the principle that applies. [195] J. Mohr: Grundlage der Empirischen Psychologie (Leipzig, 1882), p. 47. [196] In English we have not even the generic distinction between the-thing-thought-of and the-thought-thinking-it, which in German is expressed by the opposition between _Gedachtes_ and _Gedanke_, in Latin by that between _cogitatum_ and _cogitatio_. [197] Compare B. P. Bowne's Metaphysics (1882), p. 408. CHAPTER VIII. THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. Since, for psychology, a mind is an object in a world of other objects, its relation to those other objects must next be surveyed. First of all, to its TIME-RELATIONS. Minds, as we know them, are temporary existences. Whether my mind had a being prior to the birth of my body, whether it shall have one after the latter's decease, are questions to be decided by my general philosophy or theology rather than by what we call 'scientific facts'--I leave out the facts of so-called spiritualism, as being still in dispute. Psychology, as a natural science, confines itself to the present life, in which every mind appears yoked to a body through which its manifestations appear. In the present world, then, minds precede, succeed, and coexist with each other in the common receptacle of time, and of their _collective_ relations to the latter nothing more can be said. The life of the _individual_ consciousness in time seems, however, to be an interrupted one, so that the question: _Are we ever wholly unconscious?_