You make use of comparison with the rest of the senses, it
may be, but you keep strictly to the points of analogy, where mutual
lights are to be had. This is the culture of knowledge as such, and is
the best, the essential, preparation for practical questions involving
the particular subject along with others.
To take an example from the question of the Will. I do not object: to
the detaching and isolating of the problem of free-will, as a matter for
discussion and debate; but I think that it can be handled to equal, if
not greater advantage, in the systematic psychology of voluntary power.
Those that have never tried it in this last form have not obtained the
best vantage-ground for overcoming the inevitable subtleties that invest
it.
The great problem of External Perception has a psychological place,
where its difficulties are very much attenuated, to say the least of it;
and, however convenient it may be to treat it as a detached problem, we
should carry with us into the discussion all the lights that we obtain
while regarding it as it stands among the intellectual powers.
It is in systematic Psychology that we are most free to attend to the
defining of terms (without which a professed science is mere moonshine),
to the formulating of axioms and generalities, to the concatenating and
taking stock of all the existing knowledge, and to the appraising of it
at its real value.
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